The simple assembly line balancing problem type E (abbreviated as SALBP-E) occurs when the number of workstations and the cycle time are variables and the objective is to maximise the line efficiency. In contrast with other types of SALBPs, SALBP-E has received little attention in the literature. In order to solve optimally SALBP-E, we propose a mixed integer liner programming model and an iterative procedure. Since SALBP-E is NP-hard, we also propose heuristics derived from the aforementioned procedures for solving larger instances. An extensive experimentation is carried out and its results show the improvement of the SALBP-E resolution.