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2022/05/20 | Time to read: 5 min
Dalia Peña is the head of customer experience at Drishti. Dalia brings extensive experience and a keen understanding of lean manufacturing principles to Drishti. She has been able to infuse that background into the company, particularly to members of Drishti who bring less manufacturing expertise to the table. In doing so, Dalia has ensured that Drishti’s AI-powered computer vision technology stays hyper-focused on meeting the needs of discrete manufacturers across North America. Dalia was one of Drishti’s first employees, and at the time, one of the only employees with actual assembly line experience.
Standardized work is the cornerstone of any lean methodology, so many manufacturers might not realize that the concept of standardized work predates TPS by more than 50 years, and is the product of a mechanical engineer, not a Toyota original concept. In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published “The Principles of Scientific Management,” which applied the baseline rubric of the scientific method to business problems.
Instead of randomly applying changes in order to come out with better outcomes, an organization would seek to create controls and change only a select few variables to check the results. Among other things, Taylor described in detail how one performs a time study using a stopwatch and a notebook, a task well known to the modern manufacturer.
Taylor’s concept was fundamentally flawed, though. He assumed that there was one “right way” to perform a task, and once that way was discovered, you trained others on how to accomplish the prescribed steps and achieved perfection. The idea of continuous improvement was not on his radar.
Using the principles of scientific management, Henry Ford created his assembly line for the Model T and implemented standardized work on a grand scale, while also understanding that “the best way” to complete a task changed every day as improvements were implemented.
STYLIZED QUOTE: “What is the best way to do a thing? It is the sum of all the good ways we have discovered up to the present. It therefore becomes the standard. To decree that today's standard shall be tomorrow's is to exceed our power and authority. Such a decree cannot stand. We see all around us yesterday's standards, but no one mistakes them for today's. Today's best, which superseded yesterday's, will be superseded by tomorrow's best.” - Henry Ford (source)
Ford had the vision to increase the volume of production while maintaining costs that would allow for the Model T to be affordable to the average family. Ford made the first modern assembly line, and therefore the first modern mass production system. Every contemporary manufacturing system is deeply rooted in Taylor’s and Ford’s contributions.
Taiichi Ohno is considered the father of the Toyota Production System (TPS), which came to fruition in 1948. TPS is an all-encompassing system that envisions the successful manufacturing organization as a house (figure 1) with certain systems as its pillars, all of which sit atop the foundation of standardized work.
Ohno and others built on Ford’s early idea that standardized work was somewhat fluid; that while there might be a “golden way” to complete a task, the process of continuous improvement was ongoing, and therefore that golden way could change.
Lean manufacturing, an offshoot of TPS, was first introduced in 1991by James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones and Daniel Roos in their book, “The Machine That Changed the World.”
“By design, flow systems have an everything-works-or-nothing-works quality which must be respected and anticipated…it also means that work must be rigorously standardized (by the work team, not by some remote industrial engineering group) and that employees and machines must be taught to monitor their own work through a series of techniques commonly called poka-yoke, or mistake-proofing, which make it impossible for even one defective part to be sent ahead to the next step.”
― James P. Womack (source)
Whatever the lean methodology in place, what they have in common is a foundation of standardized work which, though it has evolved significantly in the past century, is still rooted in finding the best way to perform a task and unifying that across assembly operations.
Standardized work should come from the worker
Frederick Taylor was a mechanical engineer. He didn’t develop the concept of standardized work from an office, or as he was designing product specifications. It came from him observing workers on the floor. As standardized work has evolved, and TPS/lean manufacturing rose in popularity, that same concept is front and center: standardized work should come from the worker.
TPS states that the people doing the work know the job the best. They can help guide the development of standardized work with the understanding that there are multiple ways to complete a task. There is unlikely to be a static “one best way,” and in fact, the point of standardized work is to drive continuous improvement, making the process better over time.
Standardized work alone does not drive continuous improvement. It sets the foundation for improvement by establishing a baseline of cycle and action durations and sequences, and ensures consistency across stations and line associates. But unless someone is watching, tracking and deriving insights from that work, nothing changes. The key is to gather data on the work being performed and use that data to continually improve on the assembly process.
New technology and the future of standardized work
Whether you’re a hyper-focused lean manufacturer striving to higher levels of lean maturity, or you use elements of lean and other improvement methodologies to increase productivity and quality outside of a specific discipline, new technologies like Drishti are important to the next evolution of standardized work in manufacturing.
The tools to understand what’s happening on a manual assembly line, and to determine standardized work adherence, have not been updated for the digital age and are not scalable. The data sets are manually gathered via stopwatch and notebook, and are limited, biased and based on human cognitive limitations of observation. Simply put, it is inefficient and ineffective to have an engineer observing every action in a workstation.
How can we more effectively measure the work being done on the floor to best understand whether standardized work has been followed, sustained and improved upon?
Drishti seeks to solve a 100-year-old problem by automating the data collection on assembly lines and presenting that data in insightful, actionable reports and dashboards. The rest of this guide will focus on the development of this foundational concept through Industry 4.0 and beyond.
For more information on standardized work, how to implement it and how to upgrade it read our eBook.
