ABSTRACT
Introduction SMED stands for single minute exchange of die. The SMED concept was developed by Japanese industrial engineer Shinego Shingo while working with Toyota in the 1960s. Shingo saw that Toyota’s biggest bottleneck was the time it took to change the dies on the large transfer-stamping machines that produced car body panels. The dies were extremely large and heavy, and replacing one took an inordinate amount of time-12 hours or more. So, each die change was a major event and, from a practical standpoint, necessitated long production runs because the time and expense of die changes made short runs uneconomical. This translates into big inventories, more costs, and very large consequences of error.
