Should you balance the new production line?

When companies expand their capacity by installing a new production line, they try to balance the capacity of various equipment in the line. Is it a good practice?

If you have worked on commissioning such a line, you would have noticed that it takes much more time to commission such a perfectly balanced line. Some equipment or the other takes time to ramp up to the rated capacity. As a result, commissioning of the entire line gets delayed.

While designing a new line, my recommendation would be to deliberately imbalance the line by keeping only one equipment at the desired rated capacity, all others with slightly excess capacity.

You have the option to choose which equipment should get that special treatment. It will become the Capacity Constrained Resource (CCR) on that line by design and needs to be managed differently.