A focus on organizational and method aspects of set-up reduction

Flexibility is one key characteristic of a lean production process. In order to be flexible, one needs to be able to switch very quickly from producing a product A to a product B. Set-up reduction is therefore one of the key enablers for Lean Production. The basic method for reducing set-up times - the SMED method - has been published almost 20 years ago by the Japanese IE Shigeo Shingo. Nowadays, a lot of companies are still not familiar with the SMED principles and struggle with long set-up times while considering set-ups as a given. Others think of set-up reduction as a problem that can only be solved with technical modifications. After briefly reviewing the SMED method, we will focus in this presentation on organizational and method aspects of set-up reduction. These play an essential role in the set-up reduction effort. We will show that technical modifications don't guarantee an optimal set-up method. Next we will point out how organizational and method issues can be resolved with common sense and low cost improvements. We will show several real life examples from different set-up reduction projects to illustrate the presented concepts and ideas.