Did you know, one of the world’s leading flexible printing organisations was able to reduce the change over time from 5 hours to 30 minutes, just by implementing Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED)?

One of the world’s leading flexible printing organisation was facing issues with long changeover and setup times between products which lead towards creating considerable machine downtime. Apart from that, on the basis of the demand forecast, organisation had to also plan on buying additional equipment to be ready for the forecasted increased demand. Along with that, organisation was also facing quality issues and raw material wastage on a recurring basis which was an unavoidable issue for business.

So, the organisation called a board meeting to discuss these issues and to plan on how to solve them. The meeting came to a conclusion on using Japanese tools and techniques to resolve and avoid the issues for the future.

The organisation began by using and implementing SMED methods to reinvent the entire operations process and create a process that reduces the occurrence of downtime. Apart from that, the organisation also implemented 5S and ergonomic tools to properly show needed items only and minimize the risk of injuries and operator exhaustion.

The quality issues were addressed and reduced by implementing a series of these strategies. Along with that, the raw material wastage issue was resolved by strategic procedure and an innovative setup.

On the basis of the colour coding system, the number of colours that were used in the operations area, the setup or changeovers were taking on an average of 5 hours of machine downtimes. But after implementing the SMED strategy, all the setups and changeovers were completed within 30 minutes irrespective of complexity. This improvement nullified any need to buy extra equipment to meet the forecasted demand.

The employees from the third shift were also shifted to the second shift which helped the organisation increase their throughput. Raw material waste was decreased on average by 25%. These same techniques were applied to other six similar machines throughout the plant. Each of those seven machines saw an increase of approximately 5 hours per shift in additional uptime which lead to resulting in an additional 70 hours of capacity per day. The implementation of these techniques resulted in saving annually ~$3 million which was accomplished without adding a single piece of capital equipment or additional employees.

Hence, as you can see, implementing these Japanese tools and techniques are helping manufacturing organisations save millions without investing any additional capital. The same can be done in your organisation. So, have you started implementing such continual improvement tools and techniques that yield such phenomenal results?