I heard a statement recently about how SMED was something you do to ‘polish’ a process, after you have done everything else you need to do to that production process. When I worked through the experience part of gaining my Engineering Chartership I had never heard of the term SMED, it was just something you did to streamline a process – to remove the ‘dead time’ when changing over. Since the lean movement has grown (where I first heard the term SMED) we understand better the need for flexibility within production environments and how quick changeovers can really help. As you can imagine, I disputed the statement that SMED was something you do at the end. I’m sure that you agree that it is just good working practice. If you aren’t familiar with SMED it is a really useful method for taking the work out of a changeover and minimising the time where the process is not running at full speed. A common approach is to: 1 - List all of the activities required to changeover.