🚀 How I Cut Metalliser Boat Change Time from 65 to 35 Minutes — A 2017 Case Study 🚀 मैंने Metalliser Boat Change Time को 65 से 35 Minutes तक कैसे लाया — एक 2017 Case Study

🚀 How I Cut Metalliser Boat Change Time from 65 to 35 Minutes — A 2017 Case Study

📖 18-min read  |  Real Plant Case Study  |  Published April 2026  |  Bookmark for reference

In July 2017, our metalliser boat change took 65 minutes on average. Eight weeks later, we did it in 35. No new machine. No capex. No consultants on the floor. Just video, ECRS analysis, tool boxes, check lists, and a team that decided 65 minutes was no longer acceptable.

This blog tells you exactly how it happened — week by week, activity by activity, mistake by mistake. I led documentation as the metallizer engineer on the project. I filmed every changeover, timed every activity in seconds, and sat through every meeting where we tore the process apart. The data and progression in this blog are real, taken from the original 2017 project records.

If you run a metalliser plant in India today and your boat change still takes 60+ minutes, this is the playbook. The technical environment has not changed much since 2017 — the same boats, same vacuum systems, same operator pressures. What we did then will still work in your plant tomorrow.

I am writing this in April 2026, nine years after the original MET-1 project. In the years since, I have seen similar SMED methodology applied at multiple plants across India, and the results consistently land in the 30-50 percent reduction range. The 2017 data presented in this blog is real plant history. The frameworks translate directly to any metalliser plant operating in 2026.

📍 The Problem in July 2017

Our team got a clear directive that month: reduce boat change time at MET-1. The question was not whether we could do it — it was whether we could do it without buying anything new.

The numbers stared at us:

• Average boat change time over the previous 3 months: 65 minutes
• Boat changes per day: roughly 1.3 events per machine
• Daily downtime from boat changes alone: ~85 minutes per machine
• Each minute saved per cycle: 1.3 minutes saved per day, ~40 minutes per month

If we could cut 25 minutes per cycle, we would recover roughly 13 hours per month per machine — enough for 3 to 4 extra production jumbos. Across our 2-machine plant, that meant 6-8 extra jumbos every month with zero capex.

Our team was 10 people: a mentor, a team leader, me as documentation lead (the metallizer engineer), and 7 operators across shifts. We met every Monday and Thursday at 4 PM. Our brief was simple: bring the average down to 50 minutes in 3 months.

📹 Week 1 — The Day We Filmed Ourselves

The first thing I did was set up a video camera and record an actual boat change from start to finish. I expected to find a few obvious problems. What I actually found was uncomfortable.

Watching the video back with a stopwatch, I logged 31 activities for Operator 1 alone — and another 22 for Operator 2 in source-section work, plus 23 for Operator 3 on the loading and unloading side. Together, the three operators had 76 distinct activities during one boat change. Most of them looked productive. Some were not.

Here are five things the video showed us that we did not want to admit:

1. Tool taking — 23 seconds. Operator 1 walked to the tool stand, picked up tools, walked back. Every cycle. Every time.
2. Boat section cleaning by scrapper repeated 3 times. Lines 10, 12, 14 of the activity log each took 55, 72, 300 seconds. Why three rounds? Because the scrapper was being shared, dropped, picked up, used by another operator, picked up again.
3. Chamber closed, then opened again, then closed again. Lines 28-31 of Operator 1's log: chamber closing (46s), chamber opening (37s), shield setting and checking (148s), chamber closing (50s) — 281 seconds wasted because someone forgot to do the shield setting before the first close.
4. Operator 3's drum cleaning — 4 minutes 35 seconds. Necessary work, but not properly choreographed with Operator 1's source work. The two zones interfered with each other.
5. "Got tape" — 1 minute 30 seconds. Operator 3 walked across the floor, got a roll of masking tape, walked back. Every cycle.

This was the moment I realised the 65 minutes was not a problem with our equipment. It was a problem with how we organised our work. The same operators, doing the same physical tasks, would have finished in 40 minutes if the choreography had been right.

🛠️ The ECRS Discipline — Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange, Simplify

Our team leader introduced us to ECRS — a Toyota-origin technique for activity analysis. For every single activity in our 76-row activity log, we asked four questions in order:

• E — Eliminate: Can this activity be removed entirely without harming the outcome?
• C — Combine: Can this activity be merged with another, removing the transition between them?
• R — Rearrange: Can this activity be moved to a different point in the sequence (especially: can it happen before the chamber opens)?
• S — Simplify: If we still must do this activity, can we make it faster with a better tool, position, or method?

Run through 76 activities, this is mechanical work — not glamorous, but devastating in effect. Within two weeks of analysis, we had identified:

• Eliminate candidates: 6 activities (chamber close-and-reopen sequences, redundant cleanings)
• Combine candidates: 4 activities (shutter cleaning combined into single pass)
• Rearrange candidates: 11 activities (tool fetching, wire spool fetching, masking tape fetching — all moved offline)
• Simplify candidates: 8 activities (better scrappers, dedicated tool boxes, pre-cut graphite tape)

Just the eliminations and rearrangements alone — without any new equipment — projected a saving of about 12 minutes per cycle. We were already at 50 minutes on paper before we touched a single tool.

📦 The Tool Box System — Our First Real Win

Once we listed the 11 "rearrange" candidates, a pattern emerged: most of them were operators walking to fetch something. Tool, wire, tape, graphite, scrapper. The fix had to be obvious. Stage everything before the chamber opens.

We designed a 3-tool-box system specific to MET-1:

The boxes had two effects we did not anticipate. First, the obvious: zero tool-fetching time. Second, the deeper one: operators stopped sharing tools. Each station had its own. The "where is the scrapper?" delays disappeared because the scrapper was always in the same slot.

Within one week of installing the boxes, our average dropped from 60 to 55 minutes. Not from changing what we did. Just from removing the search-and-fetch.

📋 The 1-Hour Prior Check List — 22 Items, Zero Surprises

Tool boxes solved the in-chamber search. But what about the items operators had to fetch from outside the machine area? Boats. Wire spools. Graphite tape. Bubble film. Adhesive tape. Old-boat dumping box.

We documented every "what do you need before chamber opens?" item and built a single sheet — the Operator Instructions 1 Hour Prior to Chamber Opening. 22 items in total, divided across three operators by responsibility:

A note on Operator 2: Operator 2 is the source assistant — they work alongside Operator 1 during the actual changeover, sharing the same tool boxes, the same workspace, and supporting boat removal, graphite paint application, and clamp work. They do not have a separate offline check list because their role is purely "during changeover" rather than "before changeover". Operator 1 handles the offline prep on behalf of both source-side operators.

Operator 1 (Source) responsibilities (13 items):

• Tool box ready (Boxes 1, 2, 3 verified)
• Boats and graphite tape availability confirmed
• Boats and graphite tape unpacked and ready to use
• Aluminium wire cut ready (pre-cut to length)
• Graphite paste bucket available
• Bubble film ready
• Pneumatic vibrator ready (if required)
• Vacuum cleaner ready
• Adhesive tapes ready
• Gloves worn
• Box for old boats dumping (in position)
• Wire spools available and nearby
• Slitting plan + OD targets verified (production plan known to changeover lead)

Operator 3 (Loading/Unloading) responsibilities (5 items):

• Film cutter available
• Unwinder roll ready for loading with winding shaft inside it
• New core ready (optional)
• Graphite paste bucket available
• Apron ready with required tools

Other (4 items): Tool box ready confirmation, gloves worn, crane in correct position, masking tape pre-cut.

The check list was filled in by the shift in-charge one hour before the planned chamber opening. If even one item was missing, the boat change was delayed. This was non-negotiable. The check list saved more time than any tool change because it eliminated the discovery delays — the moments mid-changeover when somebody realised they needed something that was 5 minutes away.

📊 The Step 1 Progression — 8 Weeks of Real Data

Here is the actual week-by-week boat change time from our project records. Note the variation — some days were better than others, but the trend line was unmistakable:

Three things are worth noticing in this progression. First, change was not linear. There were bad days — 60 minutes on 29 July after a 55 the day before. We did not panic. Bad days are part of learning. Second, the big drops happened after specific interventions — the tool boxes installation, the check list rollout, the meeting where we redrew the operator role split. Third, by week 6 we were consistently below 45 minutes. Step 1 was working.

🎯 Step 2 — From 38 to 35 Minutes

By mid-August, our 38-minute average had stabilised. The team leader called a Step 2 review meeting on 15 August 2017 with a new target: 30 minutes. We were ambitious. We did not quite get there. But we did get to 35.

Step 2 was harder than Step 1. The easy waste — the search-and-fetch, the chamber close-and-reopen, the duplicate cleanings — was already gone. What remained was real work, and getting faster meant micro-choreography.

What we did in Step 2:

• 3 shafts arranged for offline activity. The unwinder shaft, rewinder shaft, and a spare were pre-staged. Operator 3 no longer searched for shafts.
• Video re-recorded after Step 1 changes. I filmed a new boat change at the 38-minute level and we found 6 more "rearrange" candidates and 3 more "simplify" candidates.
• 2 graphite buckets made available. One for source, one for drum shield work. Two operators stopped waiting for the same bucket.
• Bubble film spreading inside chamber. Pre-staged on a tray of half boat-section length. No more crumpling and re-spreading.
• Boat section divided into 2 equal parts. Operator 1 took one half, Operator 2 took the other. They worked in parallel on cleaning instead of one waiting for the other.
• Unwinder ready with masking tape. Pre-applied tape eliminated the "got tape" 90-second walk.
• A set of new tools arranged. Including a custom clamp face cleaner that did 3 clamps per minute (versus 30 seconds per clamp manually).

The Step 2 progression over 4 weeks:

📋 Activity-Level Time Study — Where the Minutes Actually Go

For readers who want to see the work at the second-by-second level, here is what one operator actually does during a boat change. This is from my actual 11 September 2017 video documentation, not theoretical estimates.

Operator 1 (Source Section) — 31 activities, 35:43 total time:

Through ECRS, Operator 1's total dropped from 35:43 to 31:35 — about 4 minutes off. Multiplied across 3 operators with overlapping ECRS gains, the choreography improved enough to drop 25+ minutes from the overall changeover.

The single most powerful insight from the activity table: boat mounting itself takes nearly 5 minutes and there is no way to compress that without changing the source design. We accepted this as a hard floor. Everything else became negotiable.

💡 What Worked, What Did Not

Looking back, here are the lessons that translate to any plant:

What worked. Filming an actual changeover and watching it back with the team. Nobody could deny what they saw. The "we already do that efficiently" defence collapsed in the face of video evidence. Tool boxes near the work, not in a tool room. Pre-staging the consumables an hour before chamber opening. Splitting the source section into two halves so two operators could work in parallel. Ending the day's data with a number — every shift wrote down their boat change time, and the number became part of operator pride.

What did not work, at least not at first. Top-down instructions without operator input. We tried this in the first week and got resistance. The choreography only stuck once operators redesigned it themselves — we provided the framework (ECRS, video, time data), they did the actual sequencing. The crane movement problem persisted through the entire project — we identified 2-3 minute delays from imprecise crane positioning, but the electrical fix was capex-dependent and did not happen during our window. The chamber closing problem (3-4 minute occasional delay) was similar — mechanical fix needed.

If I were doing this project again today, I would start with video on Day 1, get the team's buy-in by Week 2, install tool boxes by Week 3, and start tracking daily numbers from Week 4. Everything else flows from those four steps.

🔄 How to Apply This in Your Plant

If you are reading this and your boat change is still 60+ minutes, you have a 25-30 minute opportunity sitting in plain sight. Here is how to start, in the same week-by-week way we did it.

Week 1 — Film and document. Borrow a smartphone or get a small video camera. Record one complete boat change from start to finish. Sit down with your team and watch it back, stopwatch in hand. Log every distinct activity in a spreadsheet — name, start time, end time, duration. Do this for two more boat changes that week. You will end Week 1 with a 60-80 row activity table that nobody in your plant has ever seen before.

Week 2 — Run ECRS analysis. Take your activity table and add four columns: Eliminate, Combine, Rearrange, Simplify. Go row by row, marking which actions apply. The team should do this together — operators have insights you do not. Expect to find 8-15 activities that can be eliminated entirely, another 5-10 that can be combined, and 10-15 that can be rearranged offline. This is your project plan.

Week 3 — Install the offline prep system. The two highest-ROI changes are tool boxes and the 1-Hour Prior Check List. Tool boxes do not need to be expensive — even cardboard boxes labeled clearly will work for the first month. Position them where the work happens, not in a separate room. The check list should fit on one A4 page and be filled in by the shift in-charge one hour before chamber opens. Items not ready means the changeover gets delayed by an hour. This is non-negotiable for the system to work.

Week 4 — Roll out the new choreography. Split your operators into clear roles: Person 1 owns source, Person 2 owns loading/unloading, Person 3 (typically a trainee or a floating helper) handles offline prep and during-changeover support. Document the choreography on a single page. Post it at the machine. Track every changeover time. Do not aim for the 35-minute target on day one — aim for "consistently under 50 minutes" in the first month, then push down from there.

Months 2-3 — Step 2 refinement. Once you are stable in the 40s, film again. Look for the next layer of waste. The remaining 5-10 minute opportunity comes from second-level choreography — division of labour within source section, parallel work between operators, micro-task ordering. This is the harder phase, but the ground rules are the same: ECRS, video, daily numbers.

💰 The Honest Economics — 3 Lenses

Most SMED articles use a single number for savings. The honest answer depends on the lens you use.

Lens 1 — Raw production time recovered. 25-30 minutes saved per cycle, 1.34 cycles per day per machine = 35-40 minutes recovered per day per machine = ~18-20 hours per month per machine. For a 2-machine plant, ~36-40 hours of monthly capacity recovered. This is mathematically uncontestable.

Lens 2 — Realistic extra jumbos delivered. Raw time does not become extra jumbos one-to-one. Next-stage limits (slitter, packaging, dispatch) typically capture 30-40% of the raw potential. Realistic delivery: 2-3 extra jumbos per month per plant from boat-set changes alone. At ₹15,000-20,000 contribution margin per jumbo, that is ₹3-6 lakh of additional monthly margin.

Lens 3 — OEE improvement. Boat-set changes alone (the focus of this blog) drop setup time by 1-2 percentage points of the 1,440-minute day. The bigger OEE win comes when these same techniques are applied to inter-cycle changeovers, which add another 14-16 percentage points of OEE recovery. The combined effect (boat-set + inter-cycle SMED) typically lands at +15 to +18 percentage points of OEE Availability. For most management dashboards, that is the number that matters most.

For our 2017 project specifically, we calculated savings of 15 min per day per machine, which translated to 4 tonnes of additional metallised film per month. That number was conservative — measuring savings as recovered production time rather than recovered minutes alone gives a clearer picture.

🔬 Common Objections — Honest Answers

"Our metalliser is different — these times do not apply." The physics floor (15-16 minutes minimum for vent, pump, source verify, film handling) is universal. Your starting baseline may be 50 min or 80 min — the percentage saving from ECRS-based work is the same. We saw 42-46% reduction. You will likely see 30-50%.

"We do not have a third operator dedicated to changeover." Then your realistic target is 45 minutes, not 35. The 3-person choreography is not optional for breaking 40 minutes. If headcount is the constraint, do the math on whether one extra dedicated changeover person (₹3-5 lakh annual salary) pays for itself via 2-3 extra jumbos per month worth ₹3-6 lakh per month. The answer is almost always yes.

"Operators will not follow a written choreography." They will, once they see the changeover is shorter and less stressful. Most operators hate long changeovers — long means rushed, rushed means mistakes. A choreographed 35-minute changeover with clear roles is calmer than an improvised 65-minute one with three people bumping into each other. Critically, the operators must redesign the choreography themselves — top-down imposition fails. The supervisor's job is to enforce the choreography once defined, not to invent it.

"We tried SMED before and it did not stick." SMED fails when implemented without the daily measurement step. We posted boat change time on a board every shift. The number became operator pride. Without that visible accountability, any SMED gain regresses within months.

"What if we have crane / chamber / electrical issues like you did?" Document them, escalate to maintenance, and continue with the SMED work. Capex-dependent issues are not your project's responsibility to solve — they belong on a separate parallel track. Our crane and chamber issues persisted through our entire project. We still hit 35 minutes. The capex fix would have brought us to 30.

If your team has questions not answered above, the answers are almost always in your own video footage and time-stamped activity log. That is exactly why filming and documenting is the foundation of any SMED project.