Your Guide To Standardized Work

What type of lean manufacturing program have you implemented within your organization? If you have yet to implement some type of standardized work system, you could be seriously hurting your organization. It is important that you understand how standardized work will be able to help you focus on creating a lean environment and will allow you to have stronger communication among your staff along with a smooth flowing layout for the shop floor.

The standardized work charts will clearly lay out what your employees need to do in order to create the products and it helps them all to understand how their job will impact other people's jobs within the organization. These instructions need to be clearly laid out for your employees to understand. As far as training goes, this will really help you to train effectively as your staff will have clear instructions to reference when you are not around to help them out.

Training is one of the key elements to creating a standardized work program. You must spend ample time training all of your employees in order to help them grasp the concept of their jobs but also to help them to learn all the details about the equipment they are running. In too many companies you see issues with people as they do not follow the standardized work charts and will instead let their employees run wild and do whatever they want to run the equipment.

Using a standardized work chart you can also find out what areas of the company are not being properly utilized. This will help you to focus more on setting the right foundation for the company so you can get all of your employees involved in the program. Are you utilizing the company resources that you have available? Do you have a system in place that will help for consistency? When consistency is inline your organization will have a reduced error ratio and you might also find that your company will be stable with it's lean implementation.

For lean to become effective in any organization you need to be able to use standardized charts. Why are the charts so important? Not only do they help to break down the individual job duties, they also set time charts on the different processes within the manufacturing line. This type of communication will come all the way to management so they can see if production is slowing or if you are ahead of schedule.

Creating the charts will be pretty easy for you to do. You will have one page that includes the work chart that shows the various job duties that need to be performed for each job. The chart will move along with the timing for the jobs and show how they are related to one another's job duties so you can reach the correct outcome.

The charts need to be clearly visible so your employees can reference it when they need it. Stress the importance of using these charts as it can be easy for your employees to get stuck into routines where they do not follow the chart, which can cause issues with your lean implementation. The goal is to have standardized work and your employees need to be able to understand the impact of the charts and how they do help to impact the overall outcome for the organization.

Where should you use the standardized charts? They need to be used in numerous areas of the company but you definitely need to use them for your manufacturing cells, production operations, warehousing, material delivery, production planning, and document control areas.