Reduce changeover times and boost productivity with SMED. Increase equipment availability, flexibility and sustain long-term operational efficiency.
With more than 2 decades of experience aiding manufacturing businesses, like yours, implementing the SMED methodology we are specialists in this field.
Single-Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) is a Lean manufacturing technique used to reduce the changeover time of production machinery, with the aim of achieving a changeover time of fewer than 10 minutes.
Our expert-led SMED workshops transform your teams approach, dramatically increasing machine uptime and maximising external setup
At OPEX Coaching, we follow a proven four-phase journey to help businesses achieve sustainable operational excellence. Each phase is designed to assess, align, engage, and implement improvement strategies tailored to your needs.
We facilitate SMED workshops by engaging your frontline operators and process experts, the people closest to the work. Their insights drive practical, high-impact solutions that are both effective and sustainable.
Our facilitators guide teams through a step-by-step SMED methodology, separating internal and external activities, streamlining workflows, and eliminating non-value-adding steps.
Each SMED initiative is financially valorised to demonstrate clear return on investment (ROI). Typical programmes deliver £20K to £200K+ in validated financial benefits, depending on the complexity of the equipment and frequency of changeovers.
We ensure that improvements are embedded into standard work, visual controls, and daily management systems — enabling long-term performance gains and cultural reinforcement.
Successfully implementing a SMED program provides your manufacturing business with a powerful advantage. By providing your teams with the tools to convert internal changeover elements to external ones, balance workloads and standardise will reduce machine downtime immediately.
Change over downtime occurs when machines are changed over from one product to the next. It is an inevitable factor in manufacturing; however, when it becomes protracted, the impact can be extensive. Production bottlenecks can occur as a direct result of excessive downtime; the bottleneck is the machine that takes the longest to change from one product to the next, causing the entire production line to grind to a halt. By reducing the downtime of your critical assets, you can eliminate these bottlenecks and enable a more consistent, efficient product flow across throughout your site.
SMED methodology enables manufacturers to minimise the downtime of machines, resulting in faster changeovers. This reduces manufacturing costs in several ways, including lowering labour costs and reducing material and product inventory as smaller batch sizes become achievable.
Converting internal changeover elements to external makes changeovers faster and more efficient, giving businesses flexibility within their operations. Therefore allowing them to produce smaller batches and switch more frequently. This increased agility allows you to respond to changing customer demands with greater speed and efficiency, ensuring you produce what the market wants, when it wants it.
A lack of structure during changeover drastically increases the risk of creating defects. Providing teams with a standardised approach through our SMED training workshop creates a standard method of working, ensuring actions are performed correctly every time. This reduces the likelihood of defects, resulting in consistent high-quality product output.
We deliver all of our SMED workshops in person, combining a collaborative, hands-on practical approach with bespoke theory to help your team implement sustainable, lasting changes! Throughout our course, participants will learn and implement multiple methodologies, enabling them to solve problems, identify quick improvement opportunities, and implement targeted solutions! These methodologies include:
Eliminating production bottlenecks and inefficient changeovers is crucial to
success in manufacturing.
OPEX Coaching’s SMED workshops are specifically designed to benefit your business by coaching key members of the production team, (production managers, supervisors, engineers, and front line workers) the fundamentals required to reduce setup time. Enhancing operational efficiency.
Contact us to discover how we can enhance your setups.
If you need to reduce changeover times and increase efficiency, contact us.