Improve Major Changeover Procedure in MK0431AR Coating Area

Abstract

Today, most plants are running multiple products per line per day, including varieties of the same products, requiring many changeovers with the intense pressures to boost production efficiency, meet increasing consumer demands, and reduce production cost. The intent of this project was to reduce the time required to make a major changeover of Merck Arecibo Operations new product, MK0431AR, with the goal of increasing capacity. Reducing the changeover time is important because, in addition to increasing capacity and reducing costs, it allows the use of innovative production techniques. Before improvements, the major changeovers took approximately 6.5 hours. This time was reduced to 4.2 hours, exceeding the original target of 4.5 hours. The methodologies used to achieve this reduction were SMED and Toyota Kata. Also, as part of the project, the dust collector filter change procedure was improved to reduce their change frequency and time. Key Terms⎯ Changeovers, DMAIC, Improvement, SMED, Toyota Kata, Waste.