Implementing SMED

Implementing SMED

In my last blog ( "SMED Explanation " - Link : 

https://kalpanathchatterjee.blogspot.com/2019/03/smed-explanation.html), I have already detailed that Japanese Industrial Engineer Shigeo Shingo gave birth to the concept of SMED by helping companies dramatically reduce their setup change over time. With his concepts he was  able to bring down the changeover times averaging 94% as documented.

It may be hard to imagine that the change over time have improvement by a factor of approximately 20. E.g - setup time of 90 minutes have been brought down to 5 minutes across the wide range of companies.

Let us take an example of tire changing in a car. For an expert technician changing a tire can take 15 minutes. On the other hand a NASCAR pit crew, for changing 4 tires takes less than 15 seconds they use the concepts of SMED. To understand this we need to know how SMED is implemented. While conducting SMED project program the activities of changeover process termed as work elements needs to be studied thoroughly. 

There are two types of work element category, i.e. Internal Element and External Element. 

• Internal Element: Work elements that can be performed only when the machine / equipment is completely stopped.
• External Element: Work elements that can be performed even if the machine / equipment is running.

An Industrial Engineer must not assume, or must not take decision based upon one single Setup change trial. If possible video graphing of the setup/ changeover may be done during dry-run of the changing over process for at least five setup/ change overs. Time recording must be done for each of the work elements. Outlier conditions must be critically observed. Focused problem solving along with team brain storming must be the approach along with no-cost or low cost automation.Clear separation of Internal and external work elements must be done. Following figure explains the external and internal element separation exercise:

• How to Select an SMED Project Pilot Area?

It has been detailed in my earlier blog (link: https://kalpanathchatterjee.blogspot.com/2019/03/smed-explanation.html)

that SMED targets that the changeover process must get completed in less than 10 minutes ( Single Digit Minute). It is always better to go for SMED implementation at Pilot Machine at the initial phase of understanding building. In order to have better results project team must include complete spectrum of employees associated with machine/ equipment. The pilot area for SMED program depends on selection of ideal equipment having following characteristics:

S. No.	Characteristics	Description of relevance
1.	Duration of Changeover	The changeover should be long enough to have significant room for improvement. E.g. Approximately one hour implementation time may be able to present a good amount of room for SMED implementation.
2.	Variation in changeover time	If there is presence of large variations in changeover time, (i.e. Changeover time variation ranges from one to three hours), than the machine should be selected to run pilot project.
3.	Opportunities for testing	If the frequency of changeover is high (approximately thrice in a week) then the implemented improvements done in SMED project can be easily tested.
4.	Familiarity with the machine/ equipment	The project team must be familiar with the machine / equipment selected to run pilot project.
5.	Constraint analysis	If the equipment is a bottleneck in the process then improvement project must be conducted on it. Changeover time reduction will help in line balancing as well.

Once the equipment is selected, to begin with, the project execution team must follow the conventional way of conducting SMED Implementation. Figure below describes the complete set of processes: 

The detailed Seven stages of SMED is described in the following links:

1.       Document the setup/changeover and separate the work elements in to internal and external Elements  (Link : Step 1 of SMED Implementation)

2.       Standardize external setup activities (Link : Step 2 of SMED Implementation)

3.       Convert internal setup activities to external setup activities (Link: Step 3 of SMED Implementation)

4.       Improve internal changeover tasks ( Link : Step 4 of SMED Implementation )

5.       Improve external setup tasks (Link: Step 5 of SMED Implementation)

6.       Mechanizing the setup or using automation (Link : Step-6 of SMED Implementation)

7.       Complete elimination of changeover -Ideal Situation (Link: Stepn7 of SMED Implementation)

To be continued…