Set-Up Reduction

You may have asked, “What is Set-Up Reduction and what does it mean to me and my company?”

Set-Up Reduction is simply a cycle time reduction process that focuses on eliminating or reducing the physical, material and machine resources required to set-up a piece of equipment. Okay - that's pretty clear. Now, how do you define set-up? Because we do not want to miss any opportunity for improvement, we define set-up as all those activities required to change over a machine from the last good part of the prior run to the first approved part of the next run. This is not the "accounting" definition; it's real life. Sounds good - what are the benefits?

The benefits and rewards to the company, the employees and the customer are overwhelming: significant reductions in inventory, increased plant capacity, greater flexibility, reduced costs, shorter lead times, reduced cycle time, improved morale, satisfied customers, and more. The bottom line is more productive, more profitable and more competitive. In fact, the objective of becoming "world class" cannot be achieved without an effective Set-Up Reduction program.

Here's an example of what just one plant (of many) in one company did in just one year:

• Increased capacity by 4,500 hours with no additional equipment and fewer total hours
• Reduced overtime by $800,000 while producing an equal number of parts
• Reduced WIP inventory by $1.4 million dollars
• Throughput improved from 85 days to 14 days

At ARC Associates, LLC, we can help you train and implement Set-Up Reduction teams so that you too can experience all the wonderful benefits that many other companies have already enjoyed. We've worked with hundreds of teams and each and every one of them have significantly reduced set-up. We can show you how to reduce set-up by 50-75% for little to no cost and how to do it quickly. Give us a call. Set (yourself) up for the future.