Integration of SMED with AHP: A Case Study in an Aerospace Company

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.