<p>The cellular manufacturing technique is widely used in many industries. This research proposes an alternative to design and balance a cellular manufacturing system of an assembly company, with the purpose to obtain an optimal configuration under different criteria such as Process, Total Cost, Idle Time and Reliability. The methodology consists in: I) To obtain candidate solutions using optimization models where the objectives are to minimize Cycle Time and Total Cost II) To find the performance measures of each candidate solution using discrete-event simulation III) To choose the optimal configuration using the multi-criteria decision analysis ANP. The best configuration was found to have the bottleneck in the starting, a smoothness index in 0, the highest Reliability and Idle Time of 0%, although it was not the solution with the lower cost.</p>