Achieving competitiveness through setup time reduction

This paper has the purpose of describing the efforts of a Mexican company with several galvanizing lines, located in Monterrey, Mexico, to diminish setup time. The firm´s operations strategy requires a better performance of the plant in terms of line capacity utilization, more productivity and quicker response to market´s orders. The setup reduction project set to obtain those goals was organized to attack two fronts; The reduction of the time per setup, and the decrease of the number of setups.