Implementation of SMED Techniques to Reduce Setup Time of VMC Machines

SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) is a system for dramatically reducing the time it takes to complete equipment changeovers. The essence of the SMED system is to convert as many changeover steps as possible to “external� and to simplify and streamline the remaining steps. The name Single-Minute Exchange of Dies comes from the goal of reducing changeover times to the single Digits (i.e. less than 10 minutes). The applicability of the proposed SMED approaches can be seen by reviewing various research papers, which shows how SMED combined with various lean tools can be help in its successful implementation; this will enable reduction in setup time, through company’s internal resources reorganizations without the need of significant investment. Lean manufacturing is a concept of continuous improvement which emphasizes on the elimination of waste in the production system. To have an economical production, efforts have taken in the cycle time reduction to speed up the production rate, instead of focusing on the setup time reduction. This leads to the uneconomical small batch production. This paper describes how to reduce setup time by converts internal activities into the external activities. We have selected VMC machines for the setup time reduction with basic objective to reduced setup time by 30%. With implementation of SMED technique we could able to reduce setup time from 4 hour to 3 hour 10 min.