Jess's Lab Notebook

"Setups" as process inefficiency

Setups are the time it takes to set-up at the beginning of a production process.

Optimize for reducing “setup” time, task-switching, reducing friction to do the right thing.

If you can reduce your setup time, not only do you increase your throughput and decrease inventory, you make your production process more flexible, by making it less costly to change what you’re making.
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How much of your time is spent "getting into position to do the work"? Probably more than you think.

I was intrigued by a section in Licklider's Man-Computer Symbiosis:

About 85 per cent of my "thinking" time was spent getting into a position to think, to make a decision, to learn something I needed to know. Much more time went into finding or obtaining information than into digesting it. Hours went into the plotting of graphs, and other hours into instructing an assistant how to plot. When the graphs were finished, the relations were obvious at once, but the plotting had to be done in order to make them so.

It seems that time spent "getting into position" dominates other work as well. I was reading an analysis of the construction process and came across the fascinating but simple definition of "setups":

Setups are the time it takes to set-up at the beginning of a production process.

The author goes on to describe the many setups that litter the construction industry:

Construction has an enormous number of setups. Every time a worker puts down a hammer and picks up a saw, every time a crew moves to a different part of the building, there’s a setup. Every time the superintendent has to look at a set of plans, every time the crane unhooks from one piece and hooks on to another, there’s a setup. The months architects and engineers spend producing the drawings for the building is one long setup for the actual construction process.

He summarizes with this arresting conclusion:

Setup time can dramatically exceed the actual process time.

Seek to reduce your setup time?

"Setups" as process inefficiency
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"Setups" as process inefficiency