Improving manufacturing supply chain by integrating SMED and production scheduling

Globalization has led to a significant effect on today’s manufacturing sector. Manufacturers need to find new and innovative ways to increase efficiency and reduce waste in the manufacturing supply chain. Lean/six sigma tools can help companies increase production efficiency and stay in competition. Manufacturing in smaller batches can keep the supply chain lean and customizable. This leads to frequent changeovers and downtime. A changeover is usually required when a single machine produces different products based on the requirement. A large-scale industry can either install multiple individual production lines to cater to the demand (usually expensive) or make frequent machinery changes. Single Minute Exchange Die (SMED) is a system designed for reducing the changeover time for machines. It reduces the time taken to complete the activities and eliminates non-essential activities throughout the changeover. Scheduling an operating procedure within SMED in such case is a challenge. Project scheduling model with workforce constraints can be used to create a set of heuristics to provide us with an optimized list of tasks. The paper proposes to design a scheduling heuristic model to allocate tasks to the operators to get the least amount of operator idle time and reduce changeover downtime costs. The paper further illustrates the benefit of the model in a case study and proposes its integration within the existing SMED methodology. This results in a benefit-to-cost ratio of 7.5% for production scheduling compared to that of stages 4 and 5 in SMED, which is 1.2%.