Mitsubishi Motors has won the 2000 Machine Change-over Competition, recently conducted by the South Australian Centre for Manufacturing.

Each year the SACFM conducts a Machine Change-over Competition, in which they invite machine operators from the State’s manufacturing industry to compete against others in their field in an attempt to reduce machine change-over times, and subsequently achieve significant savings for their respective organisations.

This year’s competition involved 29 teams competing across four categories – metal stamping, plastic moulding, miscellaneous and bottling. The competition ran between March and October, with the finals taking place in November.

The team from Mitsubishi’s Stamping area won its category (Metal Stamping), as well as taking out the overall prize in the sixth annual "shop floor Olympics".

Bringing together a range of different skills, the Mitsubishi team decided to improve the change-over of one it its 400 tonne presses, which until now took just under an hour to change dies.

After an in-depth review the team identified 598 individual elements which they believed could be improved. They then set what they thought was an achievable change-over target of 20 minutes (a reduction of some 37%).

However, for a small cost of $1,900 the team was able to slash the change-over time to seven and a half minutes, or a massive 90% reduction.

Mitsubishi’s senior general manager-operations, Grant Hanan, said that being involved in the competition had many benefits.

"We have been able to simplify the procedure enormously, made it safer and saved the Company approximately $96,000 at the same time," said Mr Hanan.