Standardized Work in Machine-Intensive Processes

7 January 2016 / article

Dear Gemba Coach,
Most lean literature and case studies to date focus on assembly type manufacturing which utilizes very people-intensive operations. This is not the case in the machine-intensive process industries and therefore has major implications on the format of standardized work. Can you shed some light on what standardized work should look like in the process industries.

Thank you for this question, which provides an opportunity to investigate the point of a lean tool. Many people use magical thinking when adopting tools—assuming that by simply applying them, the process will improve and so will performance. Five S is typically prone to such hopes—and disappointments. Hopeful improvers see endless cycles of 5S drives fail to generate any radical change in either process or performance, because the tool has not been applied for the right reasons.

The crucial Lean principle to keep in mind is that lean tools were invented to help people analyze their own work patterns and see the muda they themselves generate in their own processes, so that they can look for better ways to get the job done. “Standardized work” (a set sequence of steps to do within a target cycle time), for example, is a great tool to help assembly operators see that they rarely perform the same tasks the same way, see that this involves a lot of walking, fumbling and creates defectives as well as safety risks, and learn a better way. Consequently, you are right to question whether this applies to machine shops or flow processes. The fundamental question is: which aspect of the work do we want to focus on?
Read on here.

Leading author, speaker and researcher, I work on both the "hard" (improve quality, reduce lead-time, eliminate waste) and "soft" (engage people in problem-solving and improvement to develop them to the fullest of their abilities) dimensions of Lean transformation.

I started studying improvement initiatives twenty years ago as part of my PhD. research on Mental Models. I was persuaded by Toyota engineers that to understand lean you had to practice it firsthand and I have been working with supervisors, site managers and now CEOs to leverage their lean efforts into market share, people engagement and bottom line results. You don't know what you don't know and the most surprising thing I've learned as a cognitive sociologist is the value of: see with your feet and think with your hands!

I co-founded the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France. I have written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored three business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine, one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager, and a novel about Lean practice, Lead with Respect as well as a Lean manual in French, Le Management Lean.