When starting the initiatives, there is much to be gained by finding out who in the group has the time and energy to work with a given idea. It should ideally be someone who is willing to do it voluntarily, as this guards against the expectation that the person who put forward the idea is also the person responsible for carrying it out. You could perhaps integrate the list into an existing programme of ongoing improvements and have the manager(s) in that area follow up and acknowledge the employees for completing them.
Please note that it can be time-consuming if you have to buy new tools or consumables, for example. You should therefore typically allow a suitable period of time after step 4 to make sure that the employees have/are given time to perform the agreed activities, and for any minor purchases you make to arrive.
This step produces the following results:
- A prioritised list of improvement activities that are simple to carry out and do not entail major expenditure.
- A series of tangible improvements carried out.
Step 5. Test and implement
Once you have completed the chosen initiatives, the next step is to document the changeover process in a standard, which will become the new “recipe” for how to perform a changeover. The standard must make clear which activities are to be carried out before, during and after the machine shutdown. It is a good idea to have an employee from the group write the standard in consultation with you or someone from the production department who has responsibility for standards. Remember to prepare a standard for each of the workstations that play an important role during the changeover so employees at specific stations know the sequence in which to carry out the work.
Once the standard has been prepared, you need to find a suitable time to test it. If appropriate, talk to the planning department to see if it is possible to rearrange the production schedule to include a few changeovers that you can practise at a time that suits the group. All the agreed improvements from step 4 must have been implemented before the test, and all employees who are working during the changeover must have been fully familiarised with the new standard.
Once all the preparations have been made, it is time to start practising. The test must naturally be carried out on the machines themselves, where the whole team must be ready and follow the changeover process as agreed with each activity timed. It may take a little time and need a few adjustments before it is finalised. It is therefore important to pay extra attention the first few times you carry out the new changeover process and to stop for evaluation after each. The reason for this is that you have to update and communicate the standard while you increase your knowledge about the process. To minimise possible confusion, it may be relevant to test the changeover a few times with the SMED group employees before communicating the standard to everyone else.
Once the new work method has been tested and adapted a suitable number of times, you need to make the standard visible in the area and train the rest of the employees in the new work process(es). Remember that it can take a while and that regular sparring is necessary if there are any employees who were not involved in the SMED process. There can be different ways to tackle this. In many cases, we choose to run a shared introduction for all employees in the area, with time for questions, and then let the SMED group take care of “buddy training” on the different shifts. Here, it is a major advantage to spread the members of the SMED group between the different shifts to give them the opportunity to answer questions and be present close to the actual implementation. If your company does not work with shifts, that will naturally make this part of the work easier.
When facilitating the testing and implementation, it is useful to experiment to establish which preconditions are required to maintain an efficient changeover. These could be things such as planned maintenance or a good 5S standard in the area around the machines. It is also useful to consider which data points serve as reliable indicators of the changeover efficiency in the area in question. This will help you establish one or more KPIs for the changeover efficiency in the final phase of the work.
This step produces the following results:
- A new changeover procedure has been tested and documented in a standard that is then adapted on an ongoing basis.
- All employees in the area have been trained in the new standard.
- Consideration has been given to the conditions necessary to maintain efficient changeovers.
Step 6. Deployment and sustainment
At this point, you have already put a lot of work into the analysis and implementation of new standards, and the management must now focus on establishing fixed procedures and follow-up to prevent all the good new habits from being gradually lost and forgotten. For this purpose, we use two specific management tools, namely performance measurements and process confirmation. However, it is important to remember that they are not enough in and of themselves, as an involved and interested management is an equally important factor. Deployment and sustainment is largely about presence, inquisitiveness and ongoing evaluation – better known as “Gemba management”.
A SMED process that has required intensive work with analysis and implementation can often help boost motivation among employees. The task of the management is now to retain this investment and consensus about the work and to guard against the risk of people slipping back into bad habits. When we receive feedback from employees who have participated in SMED processes with us, they often express a desire for visibility and involvement from both the senior and immediate levels of management. For this reason, we recommend that managers get involved to a relevant extent in all areas of the process and step up visibly in this final phase to demonstrate general inquisitiveness and to be in Gemba/present regarding the changeovers in the period immediately after the new standard has been put into place. The easiest approach is if the manager has been present in all stages of the process, keeping track of which improvements have been made and which agreements have been concluded regarding the new procedure as the work progresses.
Ongoing measurements and follow-up on performance
One simple approach for managers to follow up on the issue of whether the changeover speed continues to be reduced, or has stabilised, is to take regular performance measurements. The uptime of the machine is an obvious KPI to add to your Lean board (or whatever you work with) in order to follow up on this aspect. Uptime is an expression for how many hours (or minutes) out of the total number of minutes available (i.e. the employees’ working hours, less breaks and other absence) the machine has been running. If it is not possible to measure uptime, revisit your observations from step 5 and select a measurement that provides information about how long the machinery is active, or for how long the work is stopped. If you are working with old machinery that does not feature built-in automatic registration of uptime, there are a number of different digital OEE solutions you can buy. Alternatively, you can have the employees make the registrations manually. This approach is often difficult and prone to error, however, so the digital approach is clearly preferable.
With ongoing follow-up and an acknowledging conversation about the results, it is natural to ask questions about the occasions where the stop times have been longer or shorter than normal, and to use this as the basis for implementing additional improvements. In this way, you as the manager can help to ensure retention of the good habits.
Process confirmation
Another important management tool that contributes to deployment and sustainment is ongoing process confirmation. It is a good idea to make this a fixed item in a routine where you check the changeovers (together with other important processes) at regular intervals. Process confirmation entails the manager watching the production employees carry out the changeover and assessing whether they are following the applicable standard. A practical way to do this is to use the current documented standard as a kind of checklist during observations and then afterwards discuss opportunities for improvements with the employees in the area based on their performance. You must naturally show consideration for the employees, as well as respect for the work they have done, but managers who are good at this will often generate a high level of involvement among employees by showing genuine interest in the task at hand.
Step 6 is thus more of an ongoing phase than an actual step. It is not about taking a stride towards something specific; rather, it has to do with continuous sustainment and improvement. In principle, at this stage you may want to start again from the beginning and launch a new SMED process on the same changeover, where it is highly likely that you will achieve additional improvements. The SMED process should therefore not be a one-time event, but a tool you can keep on using on your changeover processes, constantly identifying the additional improvement potential that exists. Once the new changeover process has been implemented, you can take measurements to compare with your potential calculation from step 3 to establish how accurate your forecast was.
Time consumption and schedule
The task of anyone responsible for facilitating an SMED process is to establish the framework for a successful and engaging process. It is an assignment that demands thorough planning and preparation. By focusing the input on a few intensive days, you can achieve a major effect in just a short time. These are often costly days for the production department because the SMED group members cannot play an active part in the everyday production activities, and as a facilitator you need to respect this.
All in all, you should count on a full SMED process taking about a month to complete, and that this will include 4–5 intensive workshop days. In addition to these four days, the employees will need time to work on improvements, so the process as a whole will take a little longer. Over and above this one month, you will also need to devote time and energy to sustainment and deployment, so it is relevant to ask whether you will ever be “finished”. From our experience, however, it seems that one month for analysis and implementation is often a suitable period of time.
Below, you can see an example of a timetable comprising four full working days. However, not all four days will require absence from the production department. This must be coordinated with the SMED group, as well as with the other management, the planning department and the other employees.
The two first days are used to analyse the video sequences, prioritise the improvement initiative and to launch them (steps 2–4). The timetable then features a period where the group has time to implement the specific improvement initiatives. This may last 14 days or less, depending on how long it takes for the minor purchases to arrive to the factory. Finally, two full days have been set aside for testing, measurement and communication (steps 5 and 6). Of course, there is a good deal of work to be done before and after the four full days. Before the first full-day workshop, all preparations must have been made and the video(s) recorded. After the last day, there is a fair amount of work to do to establish performance measurements and process confirmation and to ensure thorough training of the other employees.