Rules for integrating fast changeover capabilities into new equipment design

The importance of short set-up times is becoming more and more important in every type of industry nowadays. How to address this problem is already known for about 20 years. The SMED method, originally developed by the Japanese Industrial Engineer Shigeo Shingo for reducing the time to exchange dies, gives a really straightforward approach to improve existing set-ups and to easily obtain a reduction of up to 90%, with mostly a moderate investment. In these past decade, several people have also realized that instead of improving an "a posteriori" situation, a lot of problems can be prevented during the design phase of the equipment. Only a few authors proposed design rules. These rules generally have a technical or engineering point of view. In several cases, the authors have noted that, even for a brand new equipment, the design can still be improved substantially. This paper extends the already published set of design rules considerably with the rules based on practical experiences from more than 60 set-up reduction projects in different industries over the last 10 years. In addition, the authors strongly believe that the responsibility of the equipment designer goes beyond these technical aspects. An efficient and effective set-up method also needs to be designed. Several basic industrial engineering tools can be used to this end. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.