Dec 6 2013
Confusion Over Standards: Limits or Basis for Innovation? | Industry Week Blogs | Jeffrey Liker
See on Scoop.it – lean manufacturing
“As an undergraduate engineering student I spent a term in the offices of a nuclear power company writing standards. I sat at a desk, with a typewriter, and nuclear engineers fed me information while I wrote the standards. Standard 300.47.3.1. I had never been to a nuclear power site and had no idea what I was writing about, and I am pretty certain nobody at the site had memorized the tens of thousands of standards. They were aimed at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who audited the company so we could prove we were safe. To the best of my knowledge pieces of paper never prevented a nuclear crisis.”
Jeffrey Liker chimes in on the issue of standards. While efforts to clear up the confusion on this topic in the context of Lean are praiseworthy, I think the terminology of “Standardized Work,” and “Work Standards” itself is hopeless.
Every author uses them differently, there is no hope of achieving consistency, and the word “standard” comes with too much undesirable cultural baggage, as illustrated by Jeffrey’s anecdote quoted above. As a result, every discussion of this topic is Tower-of-Babel project review.
Just because Toyota in the US uses terms doesn’t mean we have to, as they often are mistranslations of its own, Japanese terms, which themselves are not necessarily clear.
That’s why I prefer to talk about “work combos” for specifying how different tasks performed at different stations are combined into an operator job that fills the takt time, and “work instructions” for the breakdown of each task into steps with key points.
Then we can reserve the word “standard” for external mandates and internally generated rules and protocols used, for example, in quality problem-solving with suppliers.
See on www.industryweek.com
Oct 27 2015
Standardization Doesn’t Stamp Out Creativity | The Deming Institute Blog | John Hunter
“[…] One of the things I find annoying, in this way, is that reducing variation and using standardization is said to mean everyone has to be the same and creativity is stamped out. This is not what Dr. Deming said at all. And the claim makes no sense when you look at how much emphasis he put on joy in work and the importance of using everyone’s creativity. Yet I hear it over and over, decade after decade.”
Sourced through Scoop.it from: blog.deming.org
Michel Baudin‘s comments:
Yes, the metric system did not stifle anybody’s creativity. By making commerce, engineering, and science easier, it actually helped creative people innovate, invent, and discover.
But when Deming says “Standardization does not mean that we all wear the same color and weave of cloth, eat standard sandwiches, or live in standard rooms with standard furnishings,” he seems to exclude the possibility that standardization could be abused.
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By Michel Baudin • Blog clippings • • Tags: Deming, Standard Work, Standards, Work standards