Interrelations among SMED Stages: A Causal Model

Mexico has received a lot of foreign investment that has brought in a wide range of novel production philosophies, such as Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED). Despite its popularity and reported effectiveness, Mexican companies often quit SMED implementation as they consider it challenging. This usually happens when organizations are not familiarized enough with each one of the SMED stages or do not know how they are interrelated. In this article the interrelations among the different SMED implementation stages by means of a structural equations model are analyzed. Data for constructing the model were gathered from a survey administered to 250 employees from the Mexican maquiladora industry. The survey assessed the importance of 14 activities belonging to the four SMED stages. The descriptive analyses of these stages were conducted and integrated into a structural equations model as latent variables, to find their level of dependency. The model was constructed using WarpPLS 5 software, and direct, indirect, and total effects among variables are analyzed and validated. Results from the model revealed that Stage 1 of SMED implementation, known as the Identification Stage, has both direct and indirect effects on all the other SMED stages, being the most important stage.