What your changeovers cost you.

Unplanned downtime gets investigated. Changeover time gets scheduled, so nobody questions it. It is still hours you own and cannot sell, and unlike most losses on a floor it is directly reducible.

Cost of changeover, per year

Hours the line spends changing over: 0 a year

Labor spent setting up rather than producing$0
Margin on units the line could have made$0

Fill in the fields below and the figure will appear here.

01 The line you are looking at

Line or product familyOptional. Anything that tells you which line this sheet is about

Changeovers per weekA typical week on this line

each

Average changeover timeLast part off to first good part on, not the time the paperwork says

min

Operating weeks per yearDefault 50

wks

02 Who is on it

People involved in a changeoverEveryone whose hands are on it, including anyone pulled off another job to help

ppl

Fully loaded labor rateWages plus benefits and taxes, per person per hour

$/hr

03 What the line would have been making

Is this line capacity constrained?Yes if it is full and you are turning work away or quoting lead times you are not happy about. No if there are open hours, in which case the changeover costs labor but no sales

Good units per hour when runningNormal throughput, not nameplate

/hr

Contribution margin per unitPrice minus material and variable cost, not full standard cost

$each

04 What cutting it is worth

If you took 30% off your changeover time30%Most first pass setup reduction work lands somewhere between 20 and 50 percent, without buying anything. Move the slider to see what each level is worth on this line

What that is worth, per year

And it puts 0 production hours a year back on this line.

This sheet prices one line, not the whole plant. Changeover time varies enormously between a press and an assembly cell, so blending them produces a number that describes neither. Run it again for another line and keep both sheets. Working out what the whole operation is losing is what the audit is for.

How this is calculated, and what it leaves out

What it counts. The hours the line spends changing over, the labor paid during those hours, and, if you told it the line is full, the contribution margin on units that could have been produced instead.

Why labor counts even though you pay it anyway. The crew is on the clock either way, so this is not extra cash out the door. It is payroll spent on setup rather than on product, and treating it as free is how changeover time stays invisible for years.

On the capacity question. If the line has open hours, a changeover costs you labor and nothing else, and the margin line correctly goes to zero. The margin only becomes real when the line is full, because then the hour spent changing over is an hour of sellable production you did not get.

What it deliberately leaves out. Scrap produced during startup and first article approval, tooling and fixture wear, the inventory you carry because long changeovers force bigger batches, and the orders you decline or quote long because the line cannot flex. Every one of those is real and none of them are in this number.

Overlap warning. If a changeover runs long and that overrun already appears in your downtime log, the downtime calculator counts it too. This sheet prices planned setup time. Do not add the two results together without checking what your log captures.

On the reduction figure. It is arithmetic, not a promise. It shows what a given percentage is worth on this line so you can judge whether the work is worth doing. What it would actually take to get there depends on the setup itself.

So the figure is a floor rather than a ceiling. It is built to survive an argument with a controller, not to be impressive.