Every time a line, room, theatre or counter switches from one job to the next, nothing useful is produced. A sewing line changes style, a hotel room waits between checkout and check-in, an operating theatre is cleaned between patients, an aircraft sits at the gate. These minutes repeat many times a day and rarely appear on any report. The Quick Changeover (QCO) Toolkit makes them visible, shows where they go, and helps the team remove them step by step using the SMED method.
The toolkit is a single Excel workbook with seven working sheets:
Settings: choose your sector, set your target, changeovers per month, cost of one lost hour and the improvement start date. Eight loss categories are ready and can be renamed in your own language.
Data Input: log every changeover with date, area, from and to, start and end time, internal and external minutes, minutes lost by category, ramp-up time to target rate and right first time. Events are split automatically into Before and After.
Dashboard: Before and After averages, improvement, last-5 trend, target and world-class gap, best and worst event, internal time share, right first time, average ramp-up, yearly hours lost and the top 3 losses to focus on first.
SMED Analysis: list every step of one changeover, mark it internal or external, then convert, simplify or standardise each step and see the new time and saving.
Action Plan: the top 3 losses are pulled in automatically. Ask why until you reach a root cause, then assign a countermeasure, owner, due date and status, and keep a continuous improvement log.
Benchmarks: published industry, good practice and world-class figures for apparel style changes, machine and die changeovers, hotel room turnaround, hospital operating room turnover, aircraft turnaround and bank counter waiting time, with sources, plus a custom row for your own sector.
Self-Check: five automatic checks plus five self-ratings give the team's changeover work a score out of 100, with Practitioner (70+) and Leader (85+) levels for an in-house review by the production manager or Lean coach.
The secondary document is a 13-page PDF user guide covering how to define the changeover clock, setup in 15 minutes, the four SMED steps, the six-step problem-solving routine for the top losses and the self-check, plus a 10-prompt AI Prompt Pack.
Developed from more than 20 years of Lean and operational excellence leadership across Sri Lanka, China, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Requirements: Excel 2016 or later. No macros.
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Source: Best Practices in Lean Management, Setup Reduction Excel: Quick Changeover (SMED) Toolkit with User Guide Excel (XLSX) Spreadsheet, Lakshman Ranasinghe