Implementing SMED 4.0: A Comparison of Industry 4.0 Technologies to Enable Enterprise-Connected Manual Changeovers

Mass customization, the mass production of customized products, is driven by modern consumer desires. To meet those expectations, manufacturing changeovers need to be efficient. Some notable concepts that can improve changeovers include product variants, product lifecycle management (PLM), single-minute exchange of dies (SMED), and Industry 4.0. The combination of SMED and Industry 4.0 is called SMED 4.0. In this study, these concepts are used to develop SMED 4.0 digital assistance systems for manufacturing changeovers. The three enterprise-connected SMED 4.0 systems developed were an internet of things (IoT) dashboard, an augmented reality (AR) system, and an AR system with integrated artificial intelligence (AI). These systems were applied to changeovers on the Festo Cyber Physical Laboratory (CPL) using ThingWorx, Kepware, Arena, Festo MES4, and Vuforia Expert Capture (VEC). The three SMED 4.0 systems were built by connecting the appropriate software platforms in ThingWorx. The analysis showed that SMED 4.0 systems provide increasing benefits commensurate with their development costs. SMED 4.0 systems are shown to improve traceability, validation, speed, accuracy, and uptime. These improvements show that SMED 4.0 systems further enable mass customization by improving manufacturing changeovers.