The contribution of lean manufacturing tools to changeover time decrease in the pharmaceutical industry. A SMED project

Abstract

Every industry has a growing need to improve quality, output and voice of the customer satisfaction. The purpose of this paper is to exhibit the achieved results after implementing SMED tools at a certain production line in the Romanian pharmaceutical industry. Completing Changeovers between products on a certain packaging machine using Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) technique offers the possibility to shorten the machine downtime, increasing the final output. Implementing Lean Manufacturing philosophy, major Changeover time at the bottleneck process decreased by 30% in 12 months. Along with the economic benefits from the SMED implementation, process quality, standardization and teamwork have been improved.