Can SMED (Single Minute Exchange of Dies) be applied to office environment?

[ScottK]

Re: Can SMED be applied to office environment?

I agree that it's a good thing to not get corralled by a narrow point of view, but Single Minute Exchange of Toner Cartridges? :truce: I'd like to hear more from the OP about what he had in mind.

You haven't worked in places where it takes 2 days to get IT to replace a toner cartridge?

 

[nickh - 2011]

Re: Can SMED be applied to office environment?

I once wrote a paper titled "A New Way to Look at SMED", where SMED was re-defined as Single Minute Exchange of Documents.

I have worked at several companies where the time to update controlled documentation (work instructions, department procedures, etc.) was painfully slow. In some cases, even simple changes took several months. The ECO routing process was a bottleneck, with ECO's sitting on department managers' desks for extended periods waiting for approval. Changing Single Minute to Single Month would have still been an improvement.

The basic idea of the New SMED paper was that improvement requires change and change requires documentation revisions (not exclusively, but often enough). So unless an organization has a system that allows for efficient documentation updates, all continuous improvement activities will be hampered.

Anyway, it was really more of a play on words than a true SMED application. But many office processes deserve more attention than they usually get.


P.S. On a related note, when my son was younger, I did get pretty good at Single Minute Exchange of Diapers. Does that count?

 

[Des Williams]

Re: Can SMED be applied to office environment?

You haven't worked in places where it takes 2 days to get IT to replace a toner cartridge?

This is where we have to ask the question "why is IT replacing the toner cartridge......?"
so if you measure your change over time it would be at least 2 days.

For any of the lean tools to work you will need team work true team work, while one cant do something for what ever reason the other should be able to do it , there are no boundriers...to gain true synegy.

 

[SteelMaiden]

Re: Can SMED be applied to office environment?

This is where we have to ask the question "why is IT replacing the toner cartridge......?"
so if you measure your change over time it would be at least 2 days.

For any of the lean tools to work you will need team work true team work, while one cant do something for what ever reason the other should be able to do it , there are no boundriers...to gain true synegy.

Ah, but as I see it, this is the point. There are many organizations out there that define responsibilities so narrowly that these types of things are a common experience. (maybe not 2 days, there would be a lot of screaming and gnashing of teeth). Unfortunately, these responsibilities are not always the most cost effective, logical, or effecient.

 

[John Nabors - 2009]

Re: Can SMED be applied to office environment?

I can see how some of the SMED principles could be applied to office work just as they were applied to changing over CNC mills when I worked in a machine shop in the auto industry.

Some of the responses to my earlier posts seem to suggest that I am literally suggesting to Andrews that he apply SMED at his office to the point of installing camlocks on his filing cabinets. That is not the case.

I was taught by a very wise mentor to "take the blinders off"; one aspect of that way of thinking is that if you find a philosophy/methodology that produces improvements in one area of an organization one should look systemically at how that approach could benefit other aspects of the organization in the same manner that an 8-D problem solving event should address systemic deficiencies in such an organization.

When I worked in the auto industry plant we applied some of the SMED principles to our CNC changeovers that resulted in dramatic improvements regardless of the fact that nothing was done in a Single Minute and no Dies were harmed in the filming of these Exchanges.

 

[Ajit Basrur]

Re: Can SMED be applied to office environment?

Some of the responses to my earlier posts seem to suggest that I am literally suggesting to Andrews that he apply SMED at his office to the point of installing camlocks on his filing cabinets. That is not the case.

Absolutely. The answer to the original post if he can use SMED to Office, the answer is a Firm "NO" as the concept of SMED is applied during changeovers.

Let us not meddle with the core concepts of the SMED. If someone wants to use the spirit of SMED, let him use it without naming it as SMED.

 

[SteelMaiden]

fine, let's call it ralph. but it is still SMED concepts so who cares what we call it? I kinda liked the SMED single minute exchange of diapers.

The point is Do Not get hung up on whether or not SMED can only be used in exchange of dies, or if we can use the principles in any exchange that is taking longer than it should.

I vote for the use it where you can get some good out of it. Too many of our profession tries to buttonhole every little detail so tightly that they lose all ability to see the forest for the trees. There is no give or take, no exchange of ideas or methodology, and they just are unable to see any point of view other than the one that somebody else gave them when they first started out. Of course, those are the Q-people that do not come to the Cove, we are all extraordinarily insightful folk, that can think outside of the box.

 

[nickh - 2011]

I think SteelMaiden makes a good point about trying to buttonhole every little detail that the overall goal sometimes gets lost.

In an office environment, multi-tasking [1] is analogous to changeover. So one thing you could look at is what causes you to be inefficient every time you have to change tasks?

For me, it's train of thought and organization. So I try to minimize the effects of changeover by tracking everything I'm doing or plan to do. I keep it simple. I put my projects in manila folders and my tasks in piles on my desk. I put a little scratch pad note with each one written in human form - not so much bullet points - telling myself where I left off and what still needs to be done.

I minimize train of thought interruptions by keeping a notepad at my side and constantly making chicken scratches in it. I can't tell you how many times those chicken scratches have saved my butt.

So while it may not be elegant or systematic, my system has had the net effect of improving changeover efficiency. And that's really what you need to focus on.


[1] Multi-tasking: An MBA term for constantly interrupting progress so that everything gets done at 50% efficiency.

 

[Marc]

Also see this discussion thread: Can single minute exchange of dies concept be used in office?.