The Contribution of SMED to the Sustainability of Organizations
Résumé
In the last decade, a trend towards a reduction in the setup time of machines has been observed in industries. The case study presented here was developed in a company dedicated to manufacturing tools and moulds for the automotive, energy, electronics, and aerospace industries. In this company, there are some machines with a high setup time. Having as an objective the reduction of the setup time, it was decided to implement the Single Minute Exchange of Die (SMED) in a cutting saw. To evaluate the impact of the implementation of SMED in terms of sustainability, the impacts in the three pillars of sustainability were evaluated: economic, social, and environmental. The SMED implementation allowed a reduction of the machine setup time by about 43%. Regarding environmental sustainability, it was possible to verify an increase in energy consumption, as well as an increase in lubrication oils, which led to an increase of about 2 048,90 € in the productive cost of the machine. However, despite these cost increases, the workers’ productivity rate was also increase, reducing the environmental impact by piece produced. The obtained results make us conclude that these machine lean tools have impacted both positively and negatively those three indicators of sustainability, all due to the decrease in setup time.