Introducing SMED: single Minute Exchange of Die

Bjorn Vikard Co-Founder Impact Learning Partners

Service Three

This service is crafted to deliver exceptional value and reliability.

At Impact Learning Partners, we believe leadership development should build more than skills — it should build identity. SMED, also known as single Minute Exchange of Die, is our structured leadership development programme, facilitated by Co-Founder Björn Vikard, a best-selling author and experienced leadership practitioner with nearly two decades in global manufacturing.

The Hidden Profit Killer in Your Factory

Your machines don’t just stop. They bleed.

Every changeover stops production, delays customer deliveries, forces larger batch sizes, builds excess inventory you didn’t want, and eats into flexibility you didn’t know you’d lost. Most plants treat this as the cost of doing business. It isn’t. It’s a system problem, and it’s fixable without buying a single new machine.

That’s what our SMED — Single Minute Exchange of Die — Training Program is built to solve.

What This Program Is About

Before anything else, we make the cost real. Run this calculation — it takes 90 seconds:

• Changeovers per week: ___
• Average changeover duration (minutes): ___
• Machine hourly operating cost ($): ___

Weekly changeover cost = (changeovers × duration ÷ 60) × hourly cost

Annual changeover cost = weekly cost × 50 weeks

SMED typically reduces changeover time by 40–60%. Even a conservative 40% reduction against that annual number is your business case, sitting right there before the program even starts.

This program transforms plants stuck with long, unpredictable changeovers into operations that run documented, repeatable changeovers — with before/after time studies and financial impact calculated at every stage. Participants learn to calculate time savings, convert improvements into real financial numbers, and increase machine availability without capital investment.

It’s built for manufacturing leaders, plant managers, operational excellence teams, production supervisors, and cross-functional Kaizen teams — anywhere the business needs more flexibility, shorter lead times, lower inventory, and higher variant capability without buying more equipment to get it.

How We Do It

We work through five segments that build on each other, each one converting straight into a floor skill:

• Identify Internal vs. External Steps — map the process with video analysis, spaghetti diagrams, and work element sheets. Most plants have never done this systematically.
• Convert Internal to External Steps — apply one rule: only do what can only be done while the machine is stopped, when it’s stopped. This step alone often eliminates 30–50% of downtime.
• Reduce Internal Set-Up Time — use ECRS and 5 Why root cause analysis to fix what’s left, targeting causes instead of patching symptoms.
• Reduce External Set-Up Time — design staging layouts and prep checklists that kill the last-minute scramble for good.
• Standardize and Sustain — build SOPs, audits, and KPI tracking so the gains hold and regression gets caught before it becomes loss.

The program runs over 4.5 days. Day 1 covers the business case and current-state reality, plus the first two simulation rounds. Day 2 is analysis and mapping — video, spaghetti diagrams, RACI, and a skills matrix. Day 3 is where the real reduction happens: internal-to-external conversion, changeover cart design, Poka-Yoke opportunities, and a third simulation round. Day 4 builds the standardize-and-sustain layer — SOPs, KPI charts, the audit system. The final half-day is project launch: a 90-day road-map, accountability partner pairing, and a management briefing.

Why the Practical Exercises Matter

This isn’t a workshop where people watch a changeover on video and nod along. Every segment is tested through live simulation rounds on real equipment, so the redesign gets stress-tested before it ever becomes policy. Teams build the changeover cart, walk the new sequence, and time it — then go back and fix what didn’t work.

That structure is what makes the gains stick. Within 90 days of finishing the program, plants typically have documented changeover times trending lower each week on the pilot machine, a financial dashboard tracking cumulative savings, at least one additional machine already scoped for SMED by their own internal team, and supervisors leading changeover reviews instead of just watching them. Changeover improvement becomes a standing line on the weekly production agenda — not something waiting on the next consultant visit.

That’s the point: structured Loss Intelligence → Loss Eradication → Loss Prevention, built into how the plant runs, not bolted on as a one-time event.

Want to see what this looks like on your floor? Share your production context — number of changeovers, machine types, team size — and we’ll tailor the program scope to your operation before we propose.