Providing products with higher quality and lower prices is considered to be a competitive advantage for the industrial firms over competitors. This main challenge can be achieved by minimizing the overall production costs and operational time. Lean manufacturing provides many tools and techniques to identify and eliminate wastes and to reduce costs in production systems. In this paper, the single minute exchange of die (SMED) technique is used as a lean manufacturing approach in a leading Palestinian aluminum and profiles company. SMED was implemented through real experimental procedures applied to the extrusion line processes to investigate its effect on decreasing the setups time and improving the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) of the extrusion machine, in addition to introduce a guide for practitioners to improve the extrusion process of dies exchange in similar industries. Overall, the successful implementation of SMED resulted in an increase of OEE by 3.26% as the consequence of the increase of machine availability by 4.86%.

No abstract

This research is an attempt to understand and model the performance of short columns under different ground levels and storey number. This behaviour includes varying axial forced, shear forces, and bending moments under gravity loads. All the results have been taken for the columns at the ground level when the phenomenon of the short column has appeared. To study the performance of short columns under different ground levels and the number of stories, the 3D finite element by sap2000, and multiple linear regression analysis have been used in this study. The results show that the axial force for all types of short columns (internal, edge, corner) increases as the number of stories in the building increases at the same ground level. The effect of changing the number of floors with the same value of ground level is not significant in shear and moment for all types of columns except for the one-story and two-storey buildings. For more illustration, the moment and shear for a building composed of one story is very high compared to the two-storey building where the value becomes significantly low; then become higher again with a 3-storey building and with more stories.