Rajesh J. Dhake
B.E. Narkhede
N.R. Rajhans
Abstract
Set-up operations have traditionally demanded a great deal of time and manufacturing companies have long suffered from extreme inefficiency caused by these operations. SMED philosophy advocated by Shigeo Shingo has offered a straightforward approach to reduce output losses and quality losses due to changeovers. The efforts of Shingo have been further supplemented by Kenichi Sekine and Keisuke Arai primarily adopting the basic industrial engineering techniques for quick changeover. This paper presents an approach to reduce set-up time for dies used for press working operations in a gasket manufacturing company. The initial step was gathering data and information about the present setup times and its proportion to the total productive time. Subsequently SMED technique was adopted to investigate the setup operations. It primarily consisted of analysing the external and internal setup activities in terms of their need (i.e. preparation, replacement or adjustment), time taken and the way these could be reduced, simplified or eliminated. Also, theneed to optimize the production time or maximize output was noted and a standardized procedure of die selection was implemented. The paper concludes by comparing the present and proposed (implemented) methods of setup procedures.
Keywords- Single Minute Exchange of Die, Quick Changeover Philosophy, Lean Manufacturing