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Setup times can be reduced.
One of the impediments often encountered by manufacturing organisations in improving the agility of their supply chains is the high setup time on their production lines. As a result, they go for large batches of production and consequently lose out on dynamic synchronization of product supply with demand. It affects their product availability as well as product freshness adversely.
Why don’t they work on reducing their setup times? The underlying reason is often the belief that setup times are fixed. We also find it mentioned in some of the conventional production management textbooks.
The concept of SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) developed by Dr. Shigeo Shingo of Toyota clearly demonstrates that setup times can be reduced and there is a specific way in which it can be achieved in any context.
Next time you find that large production batches are coming in the way of demand fulfilment, identify the constraint production line and implement SMED on the constraining machine.