A CASE STUDY OF SETUP TIME REDUCTION FOR PRODUCT CUSTOMIZATION

This work describes a particular case of the successful interaction between the academia and the industry accomplished through the internship experience in the Industrial Engineering and Management (IEM) graduate programme at University of Aveiro, in Portugal. The work presents an effective application of the SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Die) methodology enabling the Portuguese company Bi-silque, S.A. to reduce setup times and to reinforce its efficiency and flexibility in order to deliver high-quality customized products. The company Bi-silque S.A. is an industry that produces visual communication boards, being one of the most recognized Portuguese companies in its business area, with an experience of more than thirty years. The company has a distinctive advantage based on innovative products and the majority of the production is for the external market. In the last years, the company has invested in modernization and internationalization processes and, in response, the demand for its products has increased significantly as well as the demand for product customization.

The operations managers are continuously evaluating their production systems in order to improve them. Reducing the operation costs while maintaining high levels of productivity is mandatory requiring a permanent action of continuous improvement. The setup time reduction is a well-known lean principle to eliminate waste and to attain high levels of flexibility allowing the companies to produce smaller lot sizes and respond to rising levels of customization imposed by the market. The SMED methodology was applied to a critical assembly line in the process with encouraging results (a setup time reduction rounding 45%). The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the SMED approach for setup time reduction, which in turn contributed to increase the flexibility of the line and the productivity of the whole facility. This study was carried out by a student of the IEM programme during his business internship experience.

This close interaction between the academia and the industry can provide significant advantages for both parties: the academia can “feed” their courses with real engineering problems which stimulate the utilization of experiential, problem-based learning methodologies and a closer alignment with the new virtual generation; the industry/service sector can use the internship students to diagnose some internal problems and to use modern engineering tools to analyze them.