One of the pillars of lean manufacturing is the low setup time that may be obtained by low cost organizational solutions and/or design such as relatively high cost machine modifications. When design change is the best solution, it is necessary to calculate the gains in order to be sure of the economic feasibility of the action. The present article introduces a method to calculate the gains originated from the reduction of setup time, and it defines the situations in which the project solutions may be considered as the first option. A case study was used to investigate the effectiveness of such method.
Setup; SMED; Lean
