Most organizations lose an enormous amount of production time and capacity due to changing over the equipment from one product to another. This is the main reason organizations choose to minimize the number of changeovers they perform. The rational is they think they are saving money in the long run with such a practice. However, normally the opposite is true because they end up running large “batches” of product in order to minimize the number of changeovers.

These “batches” are often several days or even weeks worth of material required to meet the customer demand. Therefore, the overall cost to the organization usually ends up being much higher in the long-run because this inventory consumes space, requires moving and counting it, consumes valuable equipment capacity and flexibility and ties up a lot of money in materials.

The goal of any “lean” organization should be to make every product everyday. Therefore, organizations typically need to do more changeovers, not less. But, they have to become very good at performing these changeovers. The concept is that if the changeover time is reduced by half, you can do twice as many changeovers in the same period of time without loosing any more production time, which will result in the ability to reduce your lot size by half. This is how organizations improve their response time to the customer while reducing their cost to supply that product.

We understand that it’s often difficult or impossible to do this with the way things are today in most organizations and some products and industries may never be able to do this, but the organization should have a goal to make every product everyday and constantly be looking for ways to get closer and closer to that goal.

SMED (Quick Changeover) is one of the tools of “lean” that helps organizations get closer to that goal by reducing the time required to complete a changeover. Changeover is defined as the time required from the unloading or completion of the last good part until the production of the first good part of the next run. Broadly defined, set-up includes unloading of tooling and fixtures, getting new tooling, getting tools, loading fixtures, getting materials, getting paperwork and inspection of the first part. In many cases, this entire process can take place in less than 10 minutes

The benefits an organization can expect to gain from SMED are as follows: