Reducing die change time with lean tools

Abstract: The demand for faster delivery times are increasing, which in turn increases the pressure on production companies to meet deadlines. This means that companies need to reduce their lead times to avoid losing customers to their competitors. One part of the lead time is the changeover downtime, which is the time it takes for the company to change a given machine from producing one product to another. As the machine is not producing during this process, it is time where the company is losing money. The purpose of this project was to attempt to reduce this changeover time through observing the machine in the production line with the lowest capacity. Through these observations, suggestions were generated as to how to reduce the changeover time through the use of an assortment of Lean tools. During the project, these suggestions were limited to not include other departments at the company. The suggested improvements were: - Introduce thorough documentation of each step of the die change through Standard Operating Procedure. - Perform a thorough cleaning and sorting of the workstation using the 5S-principles. - Implement checklists to prevent backsliding from occurring. - Optimize each step of the changeover. - Train staff to be proficient in operating several machines in the production line to reduce the impact of staff members being absent. These improvements were shown to be able to reduce the changeover time by 3 to 4 hours. This would have an impact on the profitability of the company, as each hour lost for the observed machine costs the company roughly 50 000 SEK due to it being the bottleneck of the system.