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2022/06/02 | Time to read: 6 min
Primo Garcia is a Continuous Improvement Adviser (CIA) at Drishti. Primo brings his rich depth of manufacturing experience to customers, helping them deploy Drishti and successfully address uncovered opportunities so they make better business decisions.
In systemizing standardized work, we are ensuring that the processes defined within an organization, particularly a production line, are being done in a predictable and consistent way. This has a lot to do with the human workers performing the work, making sure that they are doing the individual steps and actions of a job repeatedly in the same manner. Drishti specializes in action recognition, confirming that these actions are stable, and reporting problems in real time. This is far more effective than waiting to see a bad KPI in the team huddle the next day before the shift starts, or worse, from poor performance numbers at the end of the period.
The organization sets its people up for success by also standardizing the processes surrounding the work, thus creating best practices and enabling people to focus on the actions that really matter. Though workers are the primary consideration in standardized work, there are other elements to keep in mind. What often gets overlooked is the flow of both materials and information.
Materials flow
Materials flow refers to several things: first, the actual items being assembled, the raw materials of sub-assemblies of a product. Arguably, this is the most important facet, as without these materials, the bill of materials (BOM) in a finished product cannot be complete. In order for jobs to be built on time, the material for the job needs to be available on time.
Second, material refers to the tools that are being used to complete the job, including equipment that is being used to do the job build. Equipment can be the conveyor belt or even the size of a table for a given workspace. Are there duplicate workstations with different styles of tooling available? For example, a hammer: Is it the same size and shape at every workstation?
By many definitions, materials include environmental factors, as well. Lighting, fans blowing nearby, shadows from different parts of the equipment, seating and more can all be significant factors in work variation.
The case to consider materials flow
From a business perspective, creating a proper flow of materials creates a happy supply chain. Sporadic change is the enemy of efficiency. Knowing the location and working condition of all your tools is an essential part of the manufacturing flow. This is especially true as manufacturers take on various regulatory requirements and need to know the state, location and use history of their assets. It also makes it easier to train individuals with this level of standardization. There is less ambiguity when there is a “ place for everything” and that which is not necessary is not present.
Where, when and how of material
Organizations implementing standardized work may need to rethink what “standard” really means. The detailed work instructions and job instruction breakdown sheets need to be established, but that’s just one component of standardization. Material needs to show up at the right time, every time, at the same rate and to the same place in order for a cycle to be truly defined. The line associate needs to take the material to a known specific place in a workstation and use the same tools pulled from the same place, each time, in the same manner. These considerations make material availability a key component of standardized work.
Information flow
Information flow is a model of information dissemination within an organization. It views an overall system of processes as well as each step, and asks the most basic of questions:
What are the physical requirements for this step?
Does the process have any dependencies (e.g. A must occur before B)?
How do we know what we know for a given step of a process (is there documentation)?
Who maintains the documentation and how are changes made?
What happens before the process starts?
What happens after the process ends, and how does the responsible party know what to do?
Who is responsible for what, and where is this information?
How is this information shared across individuals, lines, shifts and plants?
If at any step in the process we do not know the requirements, responsibilities and information/resource flow, the model has broken down. Not everyone in the organization needs to know everything about every process, but all people involved in a given process need to know their part of it. In properly addressing information flow when designing business processes, we are able to harmonize the flow of information and ensure that there is no hangup. A person involved in a process has an if/then set of options in their head for each eventuality, which fits into the large overall flow of materials and information.
By undergoing this harmonization, we are further systemizing the organization and making a rubric by which all systems and processes can be developed afterward. By defining the flow of information at a high level, process design removes assumptions, bias and tribal knowledge that could prevent a process from being effective. If too much information is taken for granted, the organization is at a high risk of process failure. While people are the most important asset of an organization, it is very important that systems be in place so that no one person holds all of the information required to make a system function.
Many organizations have fallen prey to this mistake, believing that they have a solid process only to be missing steps when an employee goes on vacation or leaves. This is an indicator that too much information was taken for granted, and that the issue of information flow needs to be addressed.
Drishti doesn’t take information for granted
Drishti aids information flow by delivering key insights in real time without bias, providing an opportunity for workers, managers and engineers to use the results of huge samples of data to focus their improvement activities. For example, Drishti will highlight where the material is placed differently from station to station and show immediate variability on the line. Toyota’s famous andon system is centered on workers pulling a cord when they see a deviation from standard. Think of Drishti as an electronic, automatic andon that consistently spots and reports deviations from standard.
Drishti’s collaboration tools and workflows infuse objective video into active problem solving. Line supervisors and team leaders use Drishti to document good and bad practices and assign tasks in a collaborative interface. Industrial engineers define and prioritize improvement projects in the Portal, while also assigning and managing teams. Quality engineers collect inputs on quality claims within the Portal. The use of a “single source of truth” makes information transparent and accessible to all necessary parties.
That said, Drishti (or any manufacturing technology) will only have maximum effectiveness in an organization where the flow of information is clear and the systems are in place to use the provided insights. Any solution, no matter how advanced, cannot make the changes happen on its own. Therefore, new technology is only as good as the organization’s ability to use and disseminate the appropriate information to the right people in a timely manner, and effect the changes indicated. Thus information flow is essential.
If your organization makes a seamless flow of material and information through best practices, standardized work is much more effective as it is truly the only variable in question.
For more information on standardized work, how to implement it and how to upgrade it read our eBook.
