Reducing Bottlenecking With Quick Changeover

One of the biggest issues that arises when you are dealing with any type of manufacturing plant is dealing with the bottlenecking. When you have bottlenecking concerns it can lead to a number of issues related to delays in your manufacturing line to a high number of waste occurring as you end up dealing with excessive materials that are not properly used or materials that are damaged in the manufacturing process. There are so many different options that you can use when you are looking for ways to reduce bottlenecking. One of the ways in which you can reduce issues is known as quick changeover. Changeover will be able to help you to reduce bottlenecking as you are able to manage the high amount of manufacturing that occurs.

Using single minute exchange of die or the SMED method, you will be able to have improvements in your manufacturing process. This is one of the lean manufacturing tools that actually works quite well. It will be able to provide you with a lot of waste reduction as you are able to have a decrease in how many issues are occurring as you don't have concerns related to manufacturing that is going in the production process where too many items are being manufactured at the same time or you have too many people waiting on the manufacturing line to do it's job. When you use SMED you have rapid changeover. This will prevent you from having issues as you are able to keep the waiting time to a minimum.

When you end up using rapid changeover you will be able to improve the overall flow of your production line. You have the ability to have one product to move from one spot to another. This way you will not have issues pertaining to making your employees wait around and you also do not have issues related to bottlenecking where products have to continue waiting on small spots of your production process to be completed so you can move on with the next part.

The goal of having SMED used properly is to maintain faster changeovers, which usually take a minute or less. You will be able to have the complete process over within 10 minutes or less. Some other programs maintain a faster changeover which is less than 100 seconds. This is a great way to keep your production efforts inline so you can maintain the customer's expectations.

Bottlenecking will end up leading to extreme problems. You will end up having large changeover times and you can end up dealing with extensive problems if you have large time frames to deal with. It is also frustrating because you can end up dealing with many other issues as well like start and stop times. When you have to wait a lot you will have issues that are difficult to deal with such as frustrated employees and customers.

When you have to deal with bottlenecking it can also be costly to your overhead expenses. High overhead costs will end up causing you to lose money on your product value and you can also deal with other concerns as well like the costs of change-over times.

Using SMED you will be able to keep a lower rate for your change-over times but you will also be able to have a reducing in your costs related to inventory along with lower costs that are related to the amount of raw materials you need to order as you can use more of the materials you already have so that you can end up utilizing everything properly.