Integration of SMED with AHP: A Case Study in an Aerospace Company
Abstract
Setup time reduction in manufacturing organizations is widely recognized to provide
significant benefits in industries. Minimum setup time is a vital element in every type of
industry nowadays. Most of the setup reduction methods are based on Shingo’s Single
Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED). Despite a huge number of companies that succeeded in
starting the original SMED, there are numbers of company that failed during the
implementation stage due to poor decision making process throughout the whole SMED
implementation. Therefore, this paper proposes a new hybrid method of integrating the
original SMED with one of a Multiple Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) technique called
the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in order to help Decision Maker (DM) to handle
impreciseness of human’s judgements in the pursuit of implementing the SMED method.
For the sake of validation, a case study in an aerospace company is used to exemplify the
new approach. Data analysis was presented to show the final results. The result validates
the aptitudes of the proposed method in reducing the setup time.