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STANDARD WORK
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Standard Work is the foundation of Lean Production Systems and ensures opportunity for improvement.
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| "Where there is no standard, there can be no kaizen." |
The famous words of Taiichi Ohno, creator of the Toyota Production System |
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Rule 1: All work should be highly specified in content, sequence, timing, and outcome.
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This sounds too rigid for many Americans – it doesn't allow for creativity – creativity breeds innovation and improvement, etc. In fact, the exact opposite is true; standardized work actually forces improvement to occur. |
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What really happens in American factories is the lack of discipline to standards allows operators to “do it their way.” Some do it better than others; sometimes “their way” is worse. Usually, the “better ways” are not communicated between shifts and even within shifts for many reasons. Moreover, they are rarely communicated across the plant or between facilities. The result - small silos of knowledge, lack of sharing, and much variation in operation. Variation is the root of most evils concerning production and leads to inventory to make up for variation. The more inventory, the worse you can operate and not feel pain, and so on – the vicious cycle that increases costs and eventually kills businesses.
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When everything is highly specified allowing no variation, workers must follow a process and the scientific method to make improvements to the standards. This ensures universal improvement among operators within an operation and helps with standards improvement across the plant when standards are updated and communicated (called Yokoten).
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To assist with Standard Work development, Process Improvement, LLC recommends Maynard Operation Sequence Technique (MOST) to develop highly-sequenced work. Though the MOST sequence is used, the standard work developed is made more worker friendly and pictures are added to give visuals to workers. |
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BACKGROUND / HISTORY |
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Frederick Winslow Taylor (Principles of Scientific Management, 1911) is the Father of Scientific Management, time studies, and standard work. Of standard work he states,
“And whenever a workman proposes an improvement, it should be the policy of the management to make a careful analysis of the new method, and if necessary conduct a series of experiments to determine accurately the relative merit of the new suggestion and of the old standard. And whenever the new method is found to be markedly superior to the old, it should be adopted as the standard for the whole establishment.“ |
The importance of this statement is underappreciated, but years later Mr. Toyoda understood the significance. |
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Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, famous for motion and fatigue studies (1905-1924), were efficiency experts that helped change the way operations think about wasted motion of workers and helped increase efficiency and productivity in many fields.
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H.B. Maynard, famous for time-motion studies, combined the techniques from Taylor and the Gilbreths and created the first predetermined time motion system (PTMS) scientifically. It was called Methods Time Measurement (MTM - 1948). MTM-1 and MTM-2 are still in use today. |
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Maynard refined MTM to make it easier and faster to accomplish time-motion studies. This is known as the Maynard Operation Sequence Technique (MOST system - 1972). Using statistics of average workers working at an average rate, MOST is the best, most scientific way to develop standard work that can be reliably used to determine labor requirements and job performance expectations. |
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Any Lean Production System uses standard work (highly specified in content, sequence, timing, and outcome) as the foundation of all improvement. |
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