This week Beyond Lean is focusing the discussion on standardized work. There will be four posts throughout the week from different bloggers. Joe and I will post a blog as well as Tim McMahon from A Lean Journey and Christian Paulsen from Lean Leadership. The purpose is to look at different aspects of standardized work from several perspectives all gathered in one location and within the same time frame. We hope this spurs thought, reflection and action for our readers around standardized work.

An often overlooked part of standardized work is how foundational it is to continuous improvement. Standardized work is not about turning people into mindless robots. It is about setting a baseline so improvement can occur and freeing up the mental capacity from doing the routine in order to think about how the process could work better.

Standardized work creates a baseline to understand how the process is currently working. Once a process is stabilized, a baseline is created. Now an improvement can happen. A change can be made to the process and the results can be monitored. If the process improves, it will be seen. The same is true if the process worsens.

If everyone is working differently, without standardized work, then there is no stability in the process. When one person makes a change to try to improve what they are doing it is very hard to see in the results. Was the improvement due to the changes made by one employee or by the noise in the process from other employees doing the work differently? Eliminate the noise by developing standardized work.

Standardized work can help reduce the amount of time someone is thinking about getting the routine task completed, because they aren’t looking for tools or parts, the work is coming to the area without defects or fewer decisions are needed because the standardized work guides them. While there is a misconception that this is used to create humanoid robots, an organization practicing lean thinking wants the freed up mental capacity to be used on thinking of ways to improve the process. Some organizations call this the 8th waste of unused employee intellect. This is about engaging the people who do the work in the improvement process.

Without standardized work, continuous improvement is not possible and it can help to better engage the employees in how to improve their work. Just like when building a house start with the foundation. The same is true of continuous improvement…start with standardized work.

Other posts from this standardized work series: