A changeover is a machine making zero dollars

Every minute a line is being switched from one product to the next, it produces nothing and still costs you everything: labor, overhead, the orders waiting behind it. If a changeover takes 45 minutes and you run six a day, that is four and a half hours of capacity gone before a single good part is made. Cut that in half and you have effectively added a line without buying one.

The good news: most changeovers are slow for reasons that cost discipline, not money. Here is how to speed them up.

Step 1: Record one, start to finish

Put a phone on a tripod and film a real changeover, from the last good part of the old run to the first good part of the new one. Do not clean it up for the camera. You cannot fix what you have not watched, and the tape always shows waiting and walking nobody noticed in the moment.

Step 2: Split the work into internal and external

Every task in a changeover is one of two things. Internal work can only happen while the machine is stopped. External work can be done while the machine is still running the previous job: staging the next tooling, pre-heating, gathering parts, filling out paperwork. Most slow changeovers are slow because external work is being done internally, with the line sitting idle while someone walks to the crib for a tool they could have staged an hour ago.

Step 3: Move everything you can to external

Go through the recording and for each stopped-machine task, ask: could this have been ready before we stopped? Staging a changeover cart with the exact tooling, fixtures, and first-article check sheet for the next job is usually the single biggest win. The line stops, the cart is already there, the work begins.

Step 4: Shrink what is left

For the work that truly must happen with the line down, attack the slow parts: bolts that need a wrench become quarter-turn clamps, shims become stops, adjust-until-it-looks-right becomes a marked setting. These are small shop-floor fixes, not capital projects.

What good looks like

A changeover that took 45 minutes often lands near 20 after the first pass, and single digits with practice, with no new machine. The method is called SMED (single-minute exchange of dies), but you do not need the acronym to do it. You need to watch one, separate the work, and stage ahead.

If your changeovers are eating hours a day and you want a second set of eyes on where the time goes, that is exactly what a walkthrough finds.

Request your free walkthrough and we will find where your floor is losing the most time, no charge.