Find and Cut Changeover Waste with Sequence Optimization

This is a diagnostic workflow, not a one-click fix: run it to find out how much of your current sequence is genuinely costing you changeover time versus how much is just the order orders happened to arrive in.

Prerequisite

Your constraint types, item tags, and changeover matrix need to be filled in first — see Set Up Constraint Types, Product Attributes, and the Changeover Matrix. Without a matrix, there’s nothing for the optimizer to minimize.

1. Baseline the current sequence

Before you touch anything, note what the optimizer’s results panel reports as your current setup total and late-order count for the work center you’re about to optimize — this is your baseline. If you haven’t run the optimizer against this work center before, this is genuinely the first honest reading you’ll have of how much changeover the current sequence carries.

2. Run the optimizer

From the Scheduler, choose Optimize Sequence, select the work center (or work centers) you want to analyze, and confirm. Each selected work center is sequenced independently, using its own matrix — see Sequence Optimization and Changeover if you’re optimizing more than one work center in a routed shop, since accepting one changes what the next one downstream should see.

3. Read the before/after comparison

The results panel shows your baseline sequence and the proposed one side by side, with the changeover cost between each neighboring pair shown as a colored connector — green for cheap transitions, red for the expensive ones. This is where the diagnosis actually happens: look for where the red connectors cluster in the before sequence. That’s your changeover waste, visually, not just as a summary number.

Switch the constraint selector to a specific constraint code if you track more than one dimension (color and allergen, say) to see which one is actually driving the cost on this work center — it’s not always the one you’d guess.

If the panel reports no measurable improvement for a work center, that’s a real, useful answer: it means the current sequence is already close to changeover-optimal for what the matrix defines, and your effort is better spent elsewhere (or on filling in matrix cells that are still zero by default rather than by decision).

4. Accept selectively

You don’t have to take the whole proposed sequence. Review the KPI badges — setup total, late orders, makespan — before → after, and weigh them against what matters most for that work center this week. If the optimized sequence pushes a due-today order later to save a changeover, that’s worth catching before you accept, not after. Accept & Apply commits the new sequence; Reject leaves the current one untouched, at no cost — there’s no penalty for optimizing, looking, and declining.

Concepts behind this feature

Sequence-Dependent Setup: The Changeover Matrix Explained explains why a sequence that minimizes changeover and a sequence that hits every due date aren’t always the same sequence, and why that tension is worth understanding rather than optimizing away blindly.