SMED: A Literature Review from 1985 to 2015

Short changeover times have always been critical in manufacturing and are a necessity nowadays in all types of industries, due every wasted minute means inefficiency. Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) is a methodology developed by Shigeo Shingo in 1985, which seeks to reduce the setup time of a machine to less than ten minutes (Shingo, 1985). It provides a rapid and efficient way of converting a manufacturing process from a current product that is been running in the production process, to the next product (Tharisheneprem, 2008), aimed always to decrease the setup time in industrial machinery, given flexibility in product and their characteristics. Through this research, we found that we can achieve some benefits through the implementation of the SMED methodology such as: the reduction of changeover time up to 90% with moderate investments (Cakmakci, 2009), reduce waste and increase quality, it makes low cost flexible operations possible.