Improving Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of Extrusion Machine Using Lean Manufacturing Approach

Providing products with higher quality and lower prices is considered to be a competitive advantage for the industrial firms over competitors. This main challenge can be achieved by minimizing the overall production costs and operational time. Lean manufacturing provides many tools and techniques to identify and eliminate wastes and to reduce costs in production systems. In this paper, the single minute exchange of die (SMED) technique is used as a lean manufacturing approach in a leading Palestinian aluminum and profiles company. SMED was implemented through real experimental procedures applied to the extrusion line processes to investigate its effect on decreasing the setups time and improving the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of the extrusion machine, in addition to introduce a guide for practitioners to improve the extrusion process of dies exchange in similar industries. Overall, the successful implementation of SMED resulted in an increase of OEE by 3.26% as the consequence of the increase of machine availability by 4.86%.