The currently intense international competition in the industrial world has originated the need to utilize and develop new capabilities. Market´s acceptance of products and services depends now not only of their price, but also on their quality, on-time delivery, variety and volume flexibility.

The required capabilities needed to achieve the above purposes have been developed through the implementation of various technologies and work philosophies that accomplish high levels of waste reduction, integration and coordination among processes. One of the basic, and fundamental programs suggested, is that of setup reduction in the shop floor. This is a key program to increase production capacity utilization, and hence productivity, and at the same time lifting the level of flexibility of the plant in terms of volume and variety of products.

Total setup time is a result of the number of setup operations and the time required in each.

The number of setups depends at a great extent upon the production system and production programming scheme utilized. This scheme is more complex as the setups are sequence dependent and the strategy of the plant is to produce to orders.

This paper has the purpose of describing the efforts of a Mexican company with several galvanizing lines, located in Monterrey, Mexico, to diminish setup time. The firm´s operations strategy requires a better performance of the plant in terms of line capacity utilization, more productivity and quicker response to market´s orders. The setup reduction project set to obtain those goals was organized to attack two fronts; The reduction of the time per setup, and the decrease of the number of setups.

The first stage was accomplished by applying SMED, and the second one by modifying the order sequencing scheme utilized for programming production. Both stages are currently being applied, and results will be shown.