SMED: A Quick Changeover Principle

Over the years, technology has done its best to make every human activity easy and fast. Transportation is more convenient through vehicles, elevators and escalators are now more commonly used instead of stairs, and machines are beginning to fill the need for human labor or manpower.



In the area of business production, technology also aims to increase productivity. Productivity is measured by the ratio of output and the unit of input. For example, work that can be done by 10 persons in 2 hrs has a production rate of 5 persons per work-hour. In other words, to increase productivity, there should be an inversely proportional relationship between time and output, which is not possible.



The only possible way to increase productivity is to keep the unit of input constant while increasing output. This can achieved only if workers become more productive. And workers tend to become more productive when equipped with the appropriate tools. This is one important benefit that technology provides to the business industry. Creating new equipment to replace the low-productivity traditional methods can reduce the time a production process consumes; this principle is commonly known as "setup reduction."



Setup reduction can also be called "quick changeover" or the Single-Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) method. Setup time reduction and output production are vital in some integral parts of production procedures, such as Just-in-Time production and every-product-everyday scheduling. This is the reason why many mass-production companies engage their workers in thorough training involving a solid SMED presentation.



A SMED presentation includes different activities that involve a comparison between the old and new methods of quick changeover, to identify the mistake and point of improvement. Some of the basic activities are the use of a pantograph, which has joints that are connected by special bolts. There are two tables on separate locations, one containing the tools and another containing the SMED product.



A shape will be drawn using the traditional method of disassembling and reassembling of the tools, and the same shape should be drawn by disassembling and reassembling using the SMED product. This simple SMED game can determine the difference in the time it takes to do each of the two methods, and, usually, using the alternative gives an efficient setup time reduction.