“To eliminate excess inventory, (metal stamping facilities) must have the capability to produce efficiently in small lot sizes. Therefore, setups that used to take hours must now take minutes.” - Gary Zunker, President of Lightning Time Savers

In order to attain the lean, efficient status needed to compete in today’s world of manufacturing, we must reduce die change time down to an absolute minimum; therefore reducing the overall time that the press is down, maximizing the output of each press, and allowing smaller press shops the ability to compete in the global market. Through steps that include standardizing presses and dies, eliminating steps that waste time, and pre-staging, we can achieve our goal of minimum job change (the absolute minimum amount of time needed to change dies). This process, pioneered in America by Gary Zunker, President of Lightning Time Savers, is called Quick Die Change.

Quick Die Change can be attained by implementing either of the following steps:

1. Purchase new press equipment with quick die change capabilities.

2. Retrofit existing press equipment.

A combination of both processes is recommended for quickest, most immediate results. However, the second process is ideal for small operations that want to see results with the absolute minimum capital investment.

For more information, contact Lightning Time Savers at (859) 687-0481.