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Short changeover times have always been critical in manufacturing and are a necessity nowadays in all types of industries, due every wasted minute means inefficiency. Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) is a methodology developed by Shigeo Shingo in 1985, which seeks to reduce the setup time of a machine to less than ten minutes (Shingo, 1985). It provides a rapid and efficient way of converting a manufacturing process from a current product that is been running in the production process, to the next product (Tharisheneprem, 2008), aimed always to decrease the setup time in industrial machinery, given flexibility in product and their characteristics. Through this research, we found that we can achieve some benefits through the implementation of the SMED methodology such as: the reduction of changeover time up to 90% with moderate investments (Cakmakci, 2009), reduce waste and increase quality, it makes low cost flexible operations possible.

The current Supply Chain (SC) is under change. The traditional way to generate a product contained the following stages: product design, raw material selection, material transportation, manufacturability, distribution and disposition at end of life. Product design for instance, is considered an extremely important stage of a product, being that, it directs the way the product can potentially be managed along the SC. It defines the raw material to be used, the possible supplier to select, the industrial processes involved in its fabrication, the packaging for its transportation and the newest stage where the product reaches its end of life and needs to be disposed. The Product design then becomes Green Product Design (GPD), where energy, time, resources become critical for a company. GPD takes into account the whole product life cycle. This chapter presents the importance of having a GPD process into the SC, the way to incorporate it, and the benefits of implementing it into the SC.

This chapter analyzes the effects of macroergonomic compatibility of organizational elements on the performance of manufacturing systems in terms of Clients, Manufacturing Process, and Organizational Performance. As methods, a macroergonomic compatibility questionnaire is developed, statistically validated, and administered to middle and senior managers of manufacturing companies. Also, a hypothetical causal model is proposed and tested to find relationships among the constructs by using a Structural Equation Modeling. Direct, indirect, and total effects are determined, and results show that macroergonomic organizational elements have significant direct effects among themselves. Likewise, it is found that Organizational Culture and Organizational Communication have significant direct effects over Clients and significant indirect effects over Manufacturing Process and Organizational Performance. Finally, the Manufacturing Process has significant direct effects over Clients and Organizational Performance, while Clients have a significant direct effect over the Organizational Performance.