What would you do with 90 billion in your pocket in 2023?
It’s really 90 BILLION Brazilian reais. You would be standing alone at the top of Forbes’ billionaires list. Jeff Bezos would be almost an apprentice.
It’s a lot of money. Because this was the amount that the Brazilian industry left on the table in 2022, according to a groundbreaking study we conducted (check out the full study here), due to an effect that is not at all ancient:
- The hidden capacity.
Every company could be producing more than it currently does with the same resources it already has and at the same fixed costs.
You could be meeting your demand without the need for investment in new machinery and equipment, and even without compromising the stability of the people who already work with you, with new hires that could become unnecessary in a future crisis or change in demand.
It would even be possible for you to start producing in-house that component of your product that you outsource and have no complete control over deadlines, quality, and manufacturing costs. You could also be creating a new source of revenue by supplying this component to your competitors as well (which is more common than you think).
There is a world of productivity that you have already paid for, are paying for, and will continue to pay for without using, simply because you do not understand some basic concepts, methods, and tools.
How to convert hours to minutes
SMED stands for Single Minute Exchange of Die, and over time, as it became possible to apply it not only to die/mold changes, but to any type of machine configuration that resembles a “flavor change”, SMED also became known as QRM: Quick Changeover of Resources.
The basic idea is to reduce the duration of any setup operation to less than 10 minutes. SMED consists of 3 basic stages:
- Separate Internal Setup from External Setup;
- Convert Internal Setup to External Setup;
- Simplify all aspects of the Setup.
The concepts of Internal Setup and External Setup are the foundation, they are crucial for you to understand the concept of SMED and be able to extract the most from it. An Internal Setup is any activity that needs to be done with the machine turned off, completely stopped. On the other hand, External Setup is the opposite: any activity that can be done while the machine is still running.
Practicing the first two stages, which simply consist of taking note of the step-by-step setup and reorganizing the execution sequence, it is already possible to eliminate 30% to 50% of the time it takes to configure a piece of equipment.
The Challenge of Seeing
We won’t be able to solve a problem if, first and foremost, we are not capable of identifying where it is. Sometimes, even armed with knowledge to see, the demand for work and management is so suffocating that we are still unable to go and see, even if we want to.
There is much to do. To understand your setup difficulties, you need to know which setups are necessary and when they are needed, and set duration goals. With that, a new challenge arises: organizing the information and monitoring these setups on a day-to-day basis, while also being alert to problems and opportunities to improve the performance of each setup.
But you will still have to compile, clean, and organize this data, perhaps searching in different databases (from ERPs and their non-intuitive screens), and only then try to extract some useful information from them. However, all this fragmentation takes your time and/or your team’s time, and unless your company’s product is to provide data analysis, this is an activity that does not add value, but only costs.
However, being able to see the information in a practical way to act on it was what initiated an estimated gain of 1.7 million for a Brazilian pharmaceutical industry giant. In terms of product margin numbers, given the released hidden capacity, this means an estimated gain of 260,000 per year and a Return On Investment (ROI) of 500%. And the key point:
- Approximately one-third of this gain was achieved through improvements in the setup process.
To generate this impact, the team first had to be able to see that it existed. And this can be especially complicated in sophisticated and highly automated processes.
The good news is that today you can already have all of this ready, and visually track it in real-time, with customized alerts so that your leadership and those responsible can act when something goes wrong with COGTIVE:
- The tool that was crucial to see and unlock the gains you saw above.
Integrated with your factory equipment technology, working with COGTIVE allows you to directly and easily track, in real-time, the progress of each setup of your processes, compare with performance goals that you set, and have the information in the quantity and speed to make decisions and eliminate waste.
And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg of what you’ll be able to see.
Want to find out how many thousands of reais you have “left over” on your production line and recover that value? Then, don’t miss the chance to unlock the real potential of your industry with COGTIVE’s solution for maximum performance on the factory floor. Learn more about the solution by clicking here.
