A Study On Application Of SMED In L Company's Delivery Improvement Project With Collaborative Partner Supplier B

As the biggest premium foreign forklift truck manufacturing company in China,L company has been famous years after years for its great functional,good quality products in material handling industry,however,as a result of high percentage of imported components,comparatively higher unit price,when compared with domestic manufacturers,always haunts its customers in making the decision of purchasing.At the same time,the market share of L Company in Chinese material handling market only takes a small proportion,due to most of domestic competitors adopt low pricing strategy to compete.As a result,localization projects of imported components has been putting in L Company's strategy with high priority.B supplier is a subsidiary of an oversea forklift truck attachment manufacturer,established in 2013,as a part of L Company's localization project list,the subsidiary aims to supply L Company with equivalent quality attachment but lower price to substitute attachment imported from their oversea parent company.As a newly established factory,the manufacturing area was not properly organized,especially due to limited quantity of machining centers and multiple SKUs,the machining center need to be turned off frequently with long down time for product and tooling exchange,the machining area became the bottleneck process of the production line and resulted in severe capacity loss and low efficiency,poor on-time delivery rate and devastating impact on L company's forklift truck assembly timeline and shipment.Facing severe delay on L company's forklift truck assembly timeline and possible huge amount of penalty by customer,this article has the purpose of adopting a mutual conducted project by L Company and B supplier,Lean application 'Single Minute Exchange of Dies' as an example,meanwhile combining supplier management in terms of relationship and methodology of on-site investigation and analytical decision making,analyzing the implementation and the benefit to both parties after improvement,trying to demonstrate the positive impact of SMED to collaborative partner supplier delivery improvement,setting up example and reference to companies who are going to adopt SMED in application for supplier on-time delivery improvement.