Chella

SMED – Single Minute Exchange of Die, basically, in literal meaning, aims at reducing the processing of end product/service within 10 mts or in a single minute range. This also applicable where the processing time cut downs to half, say from one hour to 30 mts. This requires clear understanding of where productive time is lost and decisions on improvement initiatives are made based on hard data. The major steps involved in SMED are: 1. Identify the process – identify the process where we would like to implement the changeover. The process could be selected based on the historical data, been a lot of variance in the process/service, and the operations are frequent in nature and the relevant employees are familiar and trained for the process changeover. The process should have room for improvement. 2. Identify the elements – Analysing of the current process, step by step, would give insight for where the improvement is feasible. 3. Separate External Elements – All elements of operations to be segregated into internal and external – Internal activities represents activities which only can be done when the process is not running – External activities implies those activities which can be performed even when the process is running. 4. Convert Internal to External Elements – To gain time and improvement, focus should be converting as much as possible internal elements to external elements. 5. Streamline or Standardization – Once changeover process is implemented and gain realized from the pilot project, standardize the approach across all similar processes. Let see few examples. The universal example for the Changeover is Pit Stop, where the Pit Crew changes the 4 tires in 15 seconds in comparison to many people taking 15 mts to change a single tyre. This is achieved through performing many steps as much as possible before the Pit Stop begins (keeping sufficient tires, fuel, and equipment & tools ready) and also using a co-ordinated team to perform multiple steps in parallel, creating a standardized and highly optimized process. In a day to day operation, let’s see example of Air Craft cleaning after the passenger trip. Initially, it uses to take an hour to clean the whole air craft to keep it ready for the next operation/flight immediately. With the changeover techniques in place, like, passengers are educated and advised to deposit of their waste and used materials, in dustbin bags being carried by the airline staff. This majorly avoids the time and effort, in collecting the waste being kept at each seat traditionally, after the flight lands. With this improvement, the cleaning staff has to collect the dustbin bags and fast clean the aircraft to keep the flight ready within 30 mts for the next trip/operation. In BPO industry where with the help of technology advancement, changeover technique can be implemented, as per the appended example mentioned. For Static data capturing, the process involves, capturing of similar and same data for each application by two different employees, to compare and reduce room for errors, which would be monitored and rectified by the third person as error proofing and keep the correct data from each employee for the application process. To improve the process, both quality and time, we can introduce OCR (optical character recognition) or ICR (intelligent character recognition) techniques to read the applications and plot the relevant data at appropriate boxes in the tool/system. This way, the process would be extremely fast, accurate and can eliminate two process steps (2 processors capturing the same form) and improve the quality check/accuracy. Conclusion: To implement the changeover, one need to analyse the process, area for improvement, how beneficial be the changeover with respect to cost and benefit, revenue generation, time and productivity improvement.