The impact of run-up in ensuring Rapid Changeover

Rapid changeover is a key pre-requisite for responsive manufacture. A changeover is typically composed of three phases, run-down, set-up and run-up. Other research has focused almost exclusively on set-up with little being done to address the run-up phase, although it has been shown that doing a set-up fast can often result in a disproportionate increase in run-up. This paper investigates run-up within processing lines for which a rich database of changeover information was collected from several companies. Data mining techniques were then used to identify the factors that had a direct influence on the extent of run-up for a particular line.