Welcome to the March 2006 edition of our monthly newsletter, Learning to Lean. In this month's edition, we focus on Quick Changeover and Total Productive Maintenance.

Announcements

The following individual public courses may be taken separately or as part of a certificate program. We have very limited space remaining.

Course (click on date to register/read more)	Date
Quick Changeover and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)	Mar 23, 2006
Creating Continuous Flow Manufacturing Cells	Apr 6, 2006
Material Flow and Kanban	Apr 20, 2006
Lean Production Control and Inventory Mgmt.	May 4, 2006

Click here for details on all of our training offerings, both on-site at your facility and public.

Quick Changeover and Total Productive Maintenance

Creating continuous flow with equipment that is not reliable and has long changeover times is difficult. Both TPM and Quick Changeover (SMED) help to create the conditions for continuous flow. Even for equipment not conducive to continuous flow (such as injection molding, for example) benefit greatly by TPM and Quick Changeover by reducing batch sizes, and, consequently, inventory.

This month's edition features three articles that should help you understand more about Quick Changeover and TPM. Firstly, we talk about the reasons we want to reduce changeover and how to reduce changeover based on EPEI. Our second article talks about quick changeover implementation. Our third article discusses the elements of TPM.

The materials referenced in this newsletter will teach you more about lean. If you would like to learn more, feel free to call us at 866-559-5598 or visit our website and click on "Contact Us."

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