Achieving competitiveness through setup time reduction

This paper has the purpose of describing the efforts of a Mexican company with several galvanizing lines, located in Monterrey, Mexico, to diminish setup time. The firm's operations strategy requires a better performance of the plant in terms of line capacity utilization, more productivity and quicker response to market's orders. The setup reduction project set to obtain those goals was organized to attack two fronts; The reduction of the time per setup, and the decrease of the number of setups.