Kaikaku: Standardized Work – Toyota’s Powerful Improvement Process

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