Automate Changeovers To Cut Costs And Lift Production

By Kevin Keefe, ProAdjust

In recent years, there has been resurgence in American manufacturing, a rebirth in which businesses are succeeding in competition against low-cost regions that once held high appeal for companies looking to improve the bottom line. Today, American manufacturers can offer significant competitive advantages while keeping costs low, largely due to the lean manufacturing processes. The concept is simple — if a company operates more efficiently, it can pass those savings on and keep manufacturing dollars domestic.

Lean manufacturing consists of the removal of waste from the production process and the employment of best practices for key operations. Single-Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) is one of the many lean production methods for reducing waste in a manufacturing process.

In the SMED system, changeover times can be dramatically reduced — in many cases to less than 10 minutes. Each element of the changeover is analyzed to see if it can be eliminated, moved, simplified, or streamlined. A successful SMED program will lower manufacturing cost by lowering changeover and downtimes, reduce lot sizes (faster changeovers enable more frequent product changes), lower inventory levels (smaller lot sizes result in lower inventory levels), improve responsiveness to customer demand (smaller lot sizes enable more flexible scheduling), and consistently provide smoother startups (standardized changeover processes improve consistency and quality).

In the famous example of the first use of SMED, Toyota found that the most difficult tools to change were the dies on the large transfer-stamping machines that produce car vehicle bodies. The dies had to be changed for each model. When Toyota engineers first examined the changeover, they discovered that the existing process took from twelve hours to almost three days to complete. Through observation and improvements, Toyota was able to use precision measurements to initially cut the change-over time to an hour and a half and, eventually, to less than 10 minutes per die.

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