Author : Shashikant Shinde, Satyasheel Jahagirdar, Shriram Sane and Varsha Karandikar

Nowadays, forging industries are adopting new tools and techniques to increase productivity, operational availability and better overall efficiency of the production line. This research describes the improvement in the set-up time process of a straightening cell on Axle Beam line. SMED is one of the many lean production techniques for reducing waste in a manufacturing process. The Single-Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) methodology and other Lean Production tools (5S, Visual Management, Kaizen and Standard Work) were applied to reduce the setup time. As a result, the process setup time was significantly lowered (from 52 to 24 minutes). The percentage reduction in the set-up time 53.85%.

Keywords: Setup Reduction, Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED), bottleneck, Internal and External Activity.