STANDARDS SUPPORT CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

These materials are from Jeffrey K. Liker and the book, Developing Lean Leaders at All Levels. Online courses on these materials are provided by the Lean Leadership Institute.

The teaching objectives for this section include the following:

1.     Share the objectives for module 3.

2.     Describe Henry Ford as a key teacher of Toyota.

3.     Explain what a standardized worksheet is and how it is used.

STANDARDS AND STANDARDIZED WORK

In this module, we're going to talk about my favorite topic which is one of the more controversial topics in Lean. It is the roll of standardization and standardized work.

The learning objectives for this module are first to review fundamental principles and the benefits of standards and standardized work. We want to understand how the principles and benefits apply to service processes which can be routine, for example a Call Center process or a non-routine standard like a sales call. 

Fnally, we're going to talk about the role of standardized work in leadership and argue that Lean leadership first has the responsibility of developing and improving upon standards. Second, some leadership can be standardized; we're going to talk about standard work for Lean leaders.

WHY STANDARDIZE?

As you study Toyota, one of the interesting things you learn is that many of the ideas that we call the Toyota Way or that we call Lean actually came from many different places.

The Japanese were known as a nation of borrowers, and Toyota was very proud to borrow and not simply copy but to understand the principle and then very carefully to analyze how this principle, how this method, fits within the system that they were building, the Toyota Production System.

Henry Ford was one of their key teachers and somebody Toyota borrowed a lot from; unfortunately, the Ford Motor Company for decades didn't borrow much from Henry Ford but Toyota did.

One of the wise observations from Henry Ford was about standardization, which, as you know, can lead to red tape, bureaucracy, endless books of procedures that nobody follows and if you did follow them, you'd never get any work done.

TODAY’S STANDARDIZATION . . .

Henry Ford said that today's standardization is the necessary foundation for tomorrow's improvement; this is a very profound statement.

He's really arguing that standardization leads to continuous improvement. In fact, without standardization, I would argue you cannot have continuous improvement.

He states if you think of standardization as being the best you know today, which can be improved upon tomorrow, we're going to get some place. If you think of standards as confining, then progress is going to stop.

This idea comes from his book Today and Tomorrow from 1926, so it is not a new idea. But, yeah, even today in most organizations, we see standards being used in a confining manner. We see departments with staff experts, and their job is make up rules, make up rules, make up rules so other people can follow those rules. In fact, there may be no one checking to see whether the rules are followed or to see what happens if somebody does follow the rules¾which could be disastrous. 

 So why do we want to have standardized work or standards at all for that matter?  

There is an old saying that repetition is the mother of skill, and by that we mean that the way you develop any complex skill is through practice, and the practice means repeating something over and over and over again.

That repetition becomes a habit, and, when we develop that habit, we might not even have to think about it, and then we will have consistency. Now we can develop consistency of bad habits or consistency of good habits. What we want to come out of standardized work is consistency of good habits including consistency of direction so that whoever is doing the task has a clear understanding of the purpose of the task. 

We want consistency of performance; we want to know that whoever is doing that particular task is performing at a high level of quality and is providing the outputs that we want, which then gives us consistency of customer outcomes, so we will consistently satisfy the customer.

Finally, as Henry Ford said, when we end up with a standard that people follow. Using that standard, when observed, we find that there is a better idea. Then when we change the standard; now we have consistency of a better way which leads to continuous improvement. 

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STANDARD WORK

If you walk into many factories and look at a particular person doing work or perhaps it's a machine and there's a person near the machine, you'll often see some sort of standardized worksheet that describes the way the person should do the job. 

This is one common kind of standard worksheet that shows a list of the steps for that particular task. We show the time it takes to do the work or the value adding task, and we show the time that it takes for walking, which in this case would be non-value adding; it would be waste. 

Then we also see a diagram that shows how a person is moving; that's often called a spaghetti diagram, and we can look at a spaghetti diagram zooming in at one person and how they move through one cycle of work.

We could develop a spaghetti diagram to look at a document and how it moves throughout your organization. Or we could develop a spaghetti diagram to look at a person who's doing a whole set of tasks, say in an office building, and they are walking to the copy machine and they are going to somebody's office and they are going back to their office and we could watch their pattern. 

Any pattern of movement of either a thing or a person can be tracked like this. We see this person going from machine to machine, and they tend to come back to that center machine, and then they go out to another machine.

You would see a lot of waste. Immediately when you watch several of these cycles, you ask yourself why do they keep walking away from that machine and back to that machine? Isn't there a way to reduce that walking?

So this diagram is showing waste; it's making the waste very visible. The diagram allows us to come up with ideas for improvements.

This standardized work sheet is for repetitive tasks, and therefore will repeat. We can specify with quite a bit of confidence that these steps have to be done, and the best way to do them is in this sequence, and this is a pretty good estimate of how long it's going to take for each task.

We can add up the steps in their appropriate columns, and then we can say the total cycle time (the time it takes for things to complete one cycle) is the sum of the work time tasks, and the walk time tasks. We can compare that to customer demand and see if we have the capability to meet customer demand. 

So that's very nice, but it's only useful in the case of a repetitive task. 

There is another document that I'm not going to cover. It's called a job breakdown and it further breaks down these steps into more, sometimes microscopic, sub-steps. For each of these steps we would ask how we correctly do this particular step. For example, if we are reaching for a tool, should we use our right hand or our left hand? Is there a particular way of holding the tool so that we don't hurt our wrist? Those tips would become key points for the operator and would be used in training the operator. 

One Minute Review

·        The Japanese were known as a nation of borrowers.

·        Henry Ford was one of their key teachers and someone from whom they borrowed a lot.

·        In 1926, Ford made the observation that standardization is a necessary foundation for improvement.

·        Consistency can be developed through repetition, and repetition is the mother of skill.

·        A standardized worksheet describes what should be done, in what sequence, and how long it takes compared to the customer demand rate (takt)

·        You may even ask, “Isn’t there a better way?”

Module 3 Section 1

Question 1

Standards should lead to:

1)     Red tape

2)     A3 Ideal State Development

3)     A3 Gap Analysis

4)     A3 Target Setting Inquiry

Question 2

For a lean leader, best practices are the best way to do something and do not need to be improved.

1)     True

2)     False

Question 3

Standards form the necessary foundation for tomorrow's improvement.

1)     True

2)     False

Question 4

Positive, reinforcing habits can lead to:

1)     Consistency

2)     Poor performance

3)     Dissatisfied customers

4)     All of the above

Question 5

Following a standard enables a person to examine the standard and:

1)     A. Find a better idea

2)     B. Improve the standard

3)     A & B

4)     None of the above

Question 6

For a repetitive task, standardized work includes the steps, the time to accomplish each step, and

1)     The three major alternatives

2)     Key milestone events in one hour time increments

3)     The sequence of steps

4)     The finished product

Question 7

For a repetitive task, a diagram of one cycle of work:

1)     Tracks the pattern of movement for a thing or person

2)     Makes all waste visible

3)     1 and 2

4)     None of the above

Question 8

For a repetitive task, a diagram of one cycle of work can help you understand if there is the capability to meet customer demand.

1)     True

2)     False

Answers located at http://leanleadership.guru/answers/

*****

I hope you enjoyed this topic as much as I have. Please contact us at http:LeanLeadership.guru for all of you Lean Learning requirements. You can also reach out to me directly. I look forward to speaking with you.

George Trachilis, P.Eng., Co-founder & CEO, Lean Leadership Institute.

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