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How should you balance a serial production line?
You should not. A serial production line is defined as a series of machines working sequentially on the input material. Most production people operating such a line spend a lot of time and effort in balancing such lines to ensure that each machine has equal processing capacity.
The truth is that a perfectly balanced serial line is highly inefficient. It works only under ideal theoretical conditions when all the machines operate at 100% reliability and the processing time at each workstation is identical.
In reality, if there are 10 machines on the line and each machine is 99% reliable, you are unlikely to get even 90% of the theoretical output.
That’s why we should create imbalance in the line by design, so that only one of the machines remains as the bottleneck and can be managed in a special way.