Changeovers are one of the biggest sources of waste in manufacturing, reducing your production time and capacity every day, week and month. Since optimizing changeovers allows you to get more from your existing machines without requiring additional CapEx, it’s one of the best levers you have to improve unit economics. Reducing changeover time can also enable your team to confidently run more frequent changeovers and have smaller lot sizes without risking disruption, which can dramatically increase your production flexibility and ability to respond to customer demand.
Guidewheel allows you to track product and tool changeover times so you can identify long and/or highly-variable changeovers and make a plan to improve them. Tags allow you to collect accurate data about how long specific types of changeovers are taking so you can see where you need to improve. They also allow you to identify the best performers so you can learn their best practices and train the team to use them. Pareto Analysis shows you where you’re losing the most time to long changeovers so you know where to focus your efforts and track your progress against goals. With Guidewheel you can easily identify the best candidates for changeover reductions and make a plan to address them.
Key Guidewheel features:
Alerts | Tagging | Pareto Analysis |
Get to underlying root causes of long changeovers with Guidewheel’s Pareto Analysis
How to use them:
Tag product/tool changeovers
Refer to “Identify downtime root causes” playbook for more information about how and where to tag in Guidewheel.
We recommend creating a “Product Changeover” and a “Tool Changeover” tag so you can easily group these issues in Guidewheel.
We also recommend creating a set of more granular tags to track specific types of changeovers (for example, “Changeover to Product B”).
You can also assign multiple tags to changeovers so you can track specific types of changeovers and compare performance by operator and machine.
Pareto product/tool changeovers to find biggest outliers
Review Pareto Analysis to identify which machines and changeovers are taking the most time and/or have the most variability (a signal for improvement opportunity).
For changeovers taking more time than expected, review details to compare performance of different operators and machines.
Identify the best performers and learn their changeover process. Train lower performers on this process to improve performance across the team.
Use Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) techniques to reduce your changeovers, focusing first on “human-driven” changes, which often provide the most value in the fastest manner.
Set targets and measure daily using Pareto Analysis
Set targets for product and tool changeover times. We recommend calculating the average changeover duration by product to establish a baseline. Then you can set SMART goals for improvement.
Track progress against goals in daily meetings by reviewing Pareto Analysis.
Track your progress
Navigate to Issues > Analysis and select Chart Type “Time Series.” This shows you how issues are trending over time.
We recommend looking at the last 7 days, last 14 days and last 30 days to see how you’re trending against goals.
Make a plan to continuously improve.