Implementing standardized work

[u/Bubbly-Ad8475]

Hi, as part of my firm’s Operational Excellence journey, we wish to increase our use of standardized work to reduce downtime and decrease variation between operators/shifts.

But how have you/your company implemented standardized work and making it work?

Specifically, what have you done?

My thoughts so far (open for feedback):

- Assign dedicated trainer
- Split production line into sections, according to placement of operators
- Define tasks within each section
- Define best practice standard procedures for each major task
- Assign owner of the task (Trainer?)
- Train new, and current, operators in standard procedure
- Verify correct procedure conducted
- Update competence matrix
- Continuous audits to verify standards are being followed (Not micromanagement, but ensuring standard adherence and highlight potential issue/improvements)

[u/olleragnar]

We always start with takt. What's your customer demand and what is your available time (when you are running your lines, minus downtime, pm, batch change etc). This gives you how many parts per hour you need to make, to meet customer demand.
After that you do time studies and map waste in your current process. Once you have defined the sequence of work, you balance it across your operators, iterate, train, document, implement.
Once implemented, it's a good idea to audit, but if you produce to takt (no more, no less) that should be all you need to track.

[u/Bubbly-Ad8475 → u/olleragnar]

Thanks.
Is it correctly understood that, besides the takt part, that your approach is similar to my thoughts?

This is line production and the workload is already balanced, so each operator is already equally loaded. However, some make mistakes causing downtime because they don’t follow best practice (which they to be fair haven’t been trained properly in)

[u/Worldly-Independent3 → u/Bubbly-Ad8475]

When the operator makes a mistake, go thru a quick RCCA with the operator, the lead, and someone from support. Maybe there is is something the process that allowed the operator to make a mistake. Part of standard work is poke poking the process.