Recently, I facilitated a kaizen event which was targeted at dramatically reducing the setup time of a Former-Winder twisting machine in a textile plant.  Naturally, we performed a SMED event; dedicating 3 days to the event and 2 days of prior videotaping (performed by me, under ‘normal’ conditions). A little background... 

It is always important to recognize people’s efforts and to strengthen team building.  One way to achieve this is through the inclusion of memorabilia that states the purpose of a certain project or cross functional team, or even a company wide goal that may span years.  Here are a couple of examples of a button... 

Although SMED was clearly developed during the 1900s, there are several cases from throughout history that can be referenced when trying to explain SMED.  The very basic idea of SMED, i.e. preparing and completing External setups while the machine/process is working on the current job, while streamlining Internal setups,...