Standardized Work –
Toyota's
Powerful Improvement Process
Standardization has been ingrained into most business
activities to uniformly produce products and deliver services at the lowest
cost, the highest quality, complete safety and to the total satisfaction of our
customers. The standard represents the best way of doing
things. You examine the way the person with the highest skill does
something and that becomes the standard for others to follow. Standardized Work
as used at
Toyota has a simple but very
powerful variation of standardization.
A standard should be a unit of excellence something that should always be
strived for. At most companies, the standard represented the best way
work should be done, the correct procedure to produce a product or to deliver a
service. It was there in theory but often neglected in practice.
When I owned Productivity Inc. - Press I wanted standards to be set up, written
down and then placed into a notebook. But, in my mind, truly, the
standard represented my "security blanket," for if a person left the
company their knowledge of how to do things would not be lost to the
company. It was a false sense of security for as soon you write something
down it immediately changes, and rarely, if ever, would you take the notebook
off the shelf and update it.
When I first visited Toyota Gosei, a Toyota subsidiary producing, steering wheels, dashboards and rubber products for Toyota automobiles, I noticed a woman on the factory floor putting nozzles onto rubber
hoses. In front of her was a piece of
wood around one inch thick and two feet by two feet. Onto the wood was the exact procedure of how
the nozzle was to be inserted onto the hose. Also on the wood were examples of the perfect finished piece of hose
plus variations of hoses with errors. There were also the quality tolerances for her to check and there was
space for her to write both the problems she detected and also a place for her
to write her suggestions on how to improve the process. Most things that amazed me at
Toyota was not the automation or high tech but those things that were very simple that
helped people not machines do a better job.
Standardized work are simple documents found everywhere at Toyota to help people do a job of excellence. There is a standard on how to greet people
when they come into the company, a standard on how to process an invoice, a
standard on how to answer the telephone, a standard on how to assemble a door,
etc. At Toyota workers are encouraged every single day to come up with improvement
suggestions. And as their new ideas are
tested, accepted and implemented the standard worksheets are updated.
Consider as you work in your Kaizen Groups how to make your
decisions visible to all, how to prepare a standardized work form, and where
the form should be displayed.
Other bloggers participating are:
Bill Waddell at Evolving Excellence
Chuck Frey at Innovation Weblog
Hal Macomber at Reforming Project Management
Joe Ely at Learning about Lean
John Miller at Panta Rei
Mark Graban at Lean Manufacturing Blog
Does anyone have a standard worksheet format that they'd like to share?
Posted by: Charles Osburn | December 07, 2005 at 08:06 AM