by Mark Stover

In their haste to get lean, manufacturers often embrace tools that are geared more toward short-term business outcomes than long-term goals. While a straightforward lean approach can reveal problems and address subsequent policies for corrective action, it won’t ensure that employees will continuously work to drive improvements.

In fact, implementing lean tools can be relatively easy. The real challenge lies in creating a lean culture -- one that will sustain its focus on continuous process improvement. If manufacturers want to create long-term improvements, they cannot neglect to manage the process or overlook the importance of employee involvement.

Standardized work: Robust processes, not robotic procedures

Standardized work is a key element to successfully creating a lean culture. Far from rote rules, it’s a dynamic process that establishes the foundation for continuous process improvement and forms the platform for employee empowerment. It may sound like work standards, but it is significantly different.

Traditionally, work standards were imposed on a workforce. Industrial engineers studied the work and then told workers what needed to be done and how much time each task should require. While this information could be valuable, it ignored the all-important employee ownership element that can drive genuine and ongoing change.

Standardized work, on the other hand, centers on the fact that workers themselves understand the best ways to perform their jobs. Employees, not “outsiders,” study the jobs they know intimately in order to uncover best practices and create methodologies for continuous process improvement. Thus they become responsible for solving problems and own the standards that result.

Systemize, standardize, and put knowledge to work

Engaging employees in a continuous, ongoing, and integrated process is just one step toward lean effectiveness. Another vital step is successfully capturing and then sharing their indispensable knowledge.

Without a system to standardize the work -- to capture the “best practices” of knowledge that exist within operators’ collective experiences -- improvement activities will take on a kind of “flavor of the month.”  Workers will cooperate with the change initially only to slide back into old ways of doing things after the “program” is done.

Additionally, employees often experience difficulty communicating best practices to others across shifts and across the value stream.

Therefore, clear documentation and fixed work instructions are needed. These should reflect the direct outcome of employee examination and involvement. Ultimately, they ensure that work is performed in a consistent manner to drive out as much variation as possible and eliminate process waste. 

Such instructions should be living documents, subject to modification as employees continually recognize areas for improvement. In fact, good manufacturers evaluate standardized work documents on a daily basis; the best ones do so at the start and end of each shift. This ongoing scrutiny not only allows for constant improvements in the standards, but it can also shed light on areas where better training is needed.

Laying the groundwork for unlimited potential

Standardized work is the foundation of authentic lean and the basis for meaningful cultural change. Without employee input and their subsequent control of standardized work, the initial gains made from lean improvements are often unsustainable.

Mark Stover is a senior consultant in Wipfli’s manufacturing and distribution practice. Mark’s areas of expertise include business process improvement, lean manufacturing practices (focusing on standardized work and 5S), lean performance measurement, value stream mapping, manufacturing process auditing, policy management, training and facilitation, team development, and sales process improvement. He can be reached in Wipfli’s Madison office at (608) 661-2639 or mstover@wipfli.com.