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Lean is simply a production practice of searching out all activities that do not create value for the end user, which is considered waste, and then eliminating those wasted activities. The Reduced Effort Changeover process does just that. The following are examples:

At a major manufacturer of plastic bags, a bag making machine required 4.25 hours of downtime for a change over. The operators had been performing the change over the same way for many years and saw no reason to change. During the one week application of the Reduced Effort Changeover (REC) process, they changed their procedure and reduced the downtime to 51 minutes. In the weeks that followed operators were led through the process again and reduced the time to less than 20 minutes, a 92% reduction in downtime.

The above Spaghetti diagrams show the operator’s movement about the machine during the change over. Before the Reduced Effort Changeover (REC) event, the operator performed 1859 tasks. After the REC 4 day event the operator needed to only perform 201 tasks to achieve the same change-over. The operators win because their effort was reduced. The company wins because the downtime was reduced.

“Every time you come out, you energize a new group and show them what they are capable of and how far they can go to accomplish it. You are truly helping me advance the culture. I love the concept of focusing on effort and effort alone. The big ‘ah ha’ for me is watching how risk and time decrease as effort is reduced.” - Matt Roeser, Plant Manager, Major Bag Manufacturer.

Operator Movement Before REC

Operator Movement After REC

At a major food manufacturing plant the Reduced Effort Changeover (REC) process was applied to a case packer. Four days later the number of tasks required to do the change over were reduced from 646 to 160, and the time was reduced from 60 to 27 minutes. While reducing the time by 55%, the team noted that major progress was made in operator engagement and empowerment.

“The REC process provided a fun and very interesting way of engaging all participants to quickly come to Time & Effort reductions on a change over for our Case Packer. I have, and I speak for the rest of my plant, never seen or participated in anything remotely like the training that you gave here.....This one will definitely go down in our annals of a worthwhile and fun event. Change over is one of our biggest losses and the only way to tackle it or get our hands around it is through your process.” - Doug Rhoades, World Class Manufacturing Lead, Major food manufacturer company

At a consumer products manufacturing plant the Reduced Effort Changeover (REC) process was applied to a bottle filler. During the 4 day session the team choreographed the change over, and reduced the downtime from 42 to 13.5 minutes. Remarkably, this change over was performed by an operator who had never performed a filler change over. He simply followed the step by step procedures developed during the REC event. With continued practice this 68% reduction was further reduced to 7 minutes, for an overall reduction of 83%.