Strategizing Quick Changeover

Overview 

At Toyota, work practices are automated with a single activity per process and equipment positions are fixed. To make a car, there are hundreds of processes that require perfect balanced flow to avoid overproduction and to respond to real customer demand.

At first glance, the garment industry appears to have few processes which should make manufacturing easy to control and manage. Unfortunately, each process has in fact multiple activities. In a cutting room, the activities include spreading, cutting, fusing, band knife cutting, numbering, quality control and bundling. Without standardized work methods and a team-based concept, there are simply too many variables to successfully synchronize the activities of different workers.

In a garment factory regardless of whether traditional linear production lines or U-shaped manufacturing cells are employed, there are two major activities in order changeover: movement of sewing machines and movement of line workers. In addition, sewing machines require technical adjustments to the norms of the item to be made and, in some cases, line workers will require training on specific tasks unless they are multi-skilled. Whenever an order changeover occurs, workers will invariably need to change workstations which involves substantial chaos and delay. 

In addition to addressing each area which will require improvement and restructuring in order to achieve efficient and rapid changeovers, the course also introduces strategic tools designed monitor changeover excellence.

Overview 

You will be able to:

• Simplify and set tactics to enhance time response of each key area (workers, machinery, materials, information)
• Align workers of each product family to enable identification of idle time
• Develop and adapt workers to fixed position strategy
• Simulate and bump balance each product family through the design of team-based concept
• Set fixed position structure
• Unify order changeover requirements to one point flow in a timely manner
• Link workers to product family and operations route
• Design cross reference chart illustrating time engagement of key workers relevant to changeovers
• Formulate monitoring techniques for changeover excellence

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