ReducedEffort® Changeover

ReducedEffort® Changeover: The Lean Way to Quickly Reduce Changeover Downtime provides a step-by-step guide for conducting a Kaizen event that empowers the people who do the work to improve how that work is done. Packed with tips, tools, and examples, this practical guide begins with a clear description of the Lean principles underlying the ReducedEffort Changeover system. In addition, it explains how and why reducing the effort always reduces the time of converting a machine, line, or process from one product to another. In this book, you’ll find everything you need to quickly and dramatically reduce the effort and time of any process using the ReducedEffort method.

This is not another book about how to do SMED. Like SMED, ReducedEffort Changeover (REC) does reduce changeover time, but REC is not SMED.

SMED, Single Minute (or digit) Exchange of Dies, developed by Dr. Shigeo Shingo, has been the process used for many years by countless manufacturing plants to reduce changeover time. The SMED process was used in Toyota to reduce the changeover of a 1,000-ton stamping press from four hours to three minutes.

As a Lean-based process, the REC system focuses on reducing the labor, not the time, involved in changing over a machine to work on a different product. With REC, there are no Standard Operation Combination Sheets to fill out and no Problem Identification Sheets to complete, and it does not require the arduous chore of timing every task, as SMED does.

Very little capital investment is required with REC. Unlike SMED, it does not require management-approved funding to achieve substantial results. Because REC is not capital-driven, management does not need to drive the process. The operators will drive the process because it reduces their labor. One of the biggest advantages of REC over SMED is that operators will readily accept the process, and more important, they will want to sustain it. The reason for this is quite simple and will become evident when the REC process is defined. REC takes SMED to a new level that is easier and faster both to implement and to deliver sustainable results.

Ron Heiskell has a BS in mechanical engineering and an MBA in technology management. A knowledgeable advocate and practitioner of Lean principles, Ron first developed and tested the Lean-driven process that evolved into the ReducedEffort system at The Clorox Company, where he was an engineer for 24 years.

During his first 22 years at The Clorox Company, Ron worked in the Machine Development Group, designing and building packaging machines and lines. During that time, he began teaching a class on product innovation at two California universities. As part of this class, he taught the role that paradigms play in people resisting new ideas. He also discovered a way to shift a person’s paradigm very quickly.

When Ron was asked to teach SMED at The Clorox Company manufacturing plants, he agreed―in part because he saw it as his chance to try some new techniques. He knew that line workers had their own ways of performing changeovers and that many of them had been doing it the same way for a long time, often for 25 or more years. Their paradigms were well established. The challenge was to get them to readily shift paradigms and try something different. Teaching SMED at The Clorox Company gave Ron the opportunity to try this new reduced-effort process in the real world. The results were so amazing that his job shifted from designing packaging lines to reducing changeover downtime in all the plants owned by The Clorox Company as well as those of its suppliers.

After leaving The Clorox Company, Ron founded ReducedEffort, LLC., a company devoted to reducing changeover downtime. Since that time, he has been conducting ReducedEffort Kaizen Events at Fortune 500 companies throughout the United States and Canada.

Ron has received over fifty U.S. and foreign patents. He is the recipient of the AmeriStar Award from the Institute of Packaging Professionals, the Technology of the Year Award from Packaging Technology & Engineering Magazine, and the Dupont Award for Innovation.