The most important subject we have dwelt on in recent seminars has been ‘Standard Work’. Standard work is something that many company owners and managers have difficulty understanding, and whose benefit in the work they cannot see. In an environment where there is no standard work—and many companies attribute this situation to many causes and claim that, because of product variety, standard work cannot be applied in their own companies—it is clear that there will be no measurement and no evaluation. In that case it is also clear that improvement cannot be measured. How could you do it? It is not possible for you to see the waste (Muda, Mura, Muri) present in the work being done. If you cannot see the problem, how will you plan the improvement?
Standard work is often confused with producing a standard product. That is, the basic mistake is to take standard work to mean standard products, always producing the same products. When we define standard work as ‘always doing the jobs in the same way’, however, it becomes possible to understand it as producing many products on a line or a machine, and always producing those products in the same way. This can be explained with an example. Suppose you are a contracting firm and you do electrical panels, building electrical installations, and electrical repair work. What would standard work mean in this firm? (This question was in fact asked in exactly this way.) Under normal conditions, and as in many firms, employees do the next job in teams. In that case every employee becomes obliged to know every service and every product that is produced, and because this is often not possible, production is continually done at a different quality and speed. Customer complaints have gotten out of hand. Trips to and from the work sites, delays in the jobs, and forgotten materials or equipment are in a state that gives you a serious headache.
The work to be done in this firm, however, is very easy, and it is called standard work. To do it, it is very easy first to classify the jobs and assign a team to each class of job. For example, if you assign a team or an employee to panel-production jobs, that employee will specialize in the subject and will do the work much faster and more productively. It is possible, in the same way, to assign a team for assembly of the panel that is produced. In electrical-installation work, it is possible to assign one team to the work done under the plaster, which is called infrastructure, and another team to the work done after painting, which is defined as assembly. In this way it is possible to reduce the materials and equipment employees use, and the knowledge and skills they need.
Setting up the standard work system also has a standard structure, as with all work. What you need to do in order to standardize every job in your company consists of the practices below;
Dividing the product or service into classes:
Classification is one of the most important principles of management. You should apply this principle to the products and services you produce, and divide them into classes. Here it is possible to reduce the resources required by gathering similar products and services into one class.
Determining the resources required to produce the product and service class:
You should determine the inputs required to produce the product and service you previously divided into classes. While doing this, you will see that you need far fewer resources than in a way of working where people rush to every job and produce every job with the same resources. To give a simple example, one person might be able to assemble an automobile alone only in six months. In that case, a firm producing 100,000 automobiles would have needed 50,000 employees to produce that quantity if it had not classified the work and produced it in a flow.
Dividing the tasks and setting up a production system in the form of a flow:
Tasks should be divided by assigning a team for each product you have classified. In this way it will be possible to standardize the work each employee does and the equipment they use. In the end you will see that productivity has increased many times over and the level of quality has risen.
