Early along, as a student of the Toyota Production System (TPS), now referred to as lean, I struggled with some of the concepts and systems. For example, Shigeo Shingo’s claim that a four-hour machine setup could be reduced to less than 10 minutes made me a skeptic.

“Perhaps, when Mr. Shingo talked about single-minute exchange of dies [SMED], he was referring only to machinery in which the changeover involved die changes,” I thought. “CNC lathes were different; no chance for single-minute changeover there.” I kept these doubts to myself although I believe the machine operators had similar doubts. We’d made modest setup improvements, but nothing like Shingo was suggesting. Anything beyond low-hanging fruit took us too far out of our comfort zone.

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