Companies that are serious about the Lean Business Culture standardize everything they can. The most important things to standardize are are the procedures we use to create value for our customers– Process Standards. Here are seven benefits that result:

For the remainder of 2024, I plan to post “juicy quotes” weekly instead of daily. I have several training development projects going, and want to focus on them for the rest of this year. At this point, I expect to do weekly posts on Tuesdays. Blessings to you –Ray Randolph

“… We distinguish Lean from all other process improvement methodologies by the characteristic of collaborative continual problem-solving i.e. organizational learning. This simply can’t happen without standard work.” “…individuals can learn without standard work, but organizations cannot.”  The Lean Management System by Joe Murli (The Murli Group, 2015) p. 67.

Here’s a question that might come to mind when we consider standardizing work procedures. “Will standards turn us into un-thinking robots?” This is a reasonable concern, and it HAS happened frequently in the history of business:Control-oriented leaders have used standards to essentially say to their workers, “Don’t THINK, just DO what we tell you…follow these […]

It’s easy to think that standards REDUCE creativity. One of the big surprises in Lean is the exact opposite: when used rightly, standards INCREASE creativity and flexibility. They do so by capturing the ideas and improvements we make to a process, and spreading them to everyone who performs that process. The improved process then becomes […]

“Standard work is the platform upon which the next improvement is built. Without standard work each individual develops their own way of doing things sometimes narrowly and sometimes widely. The standard way of doing things is the backbone of the team meeting and discussing the next area of improvement. It enables communication on a deep […]

“The establishment of standardized processes and procedures is the greatest key to creating consistent performance. It is only when the process is stable that you can begin the creative progression of continuous improvement. As we’ve shown in the previous chapters, the work of developing standards begins early in a lean implementation and is a common […]

“Standards are, in my opinion, the most important foundation of Lean and one which is often underrated and given less attention by manufacturing professionals. This is one of the main reasons why implementations of lean manufacturing often fail to deliver their full potential or at all. The discipline of setting and maintaining work standards and […]

As I mentioned in the previous post, there are many things to “standardize” in business. In the Lean Business Culture, perhaps the most important thing to standardize is the work processes we use to create customer value. This is known as “Standardized Work.” (See Note 1 below) Here are a few definitions: “A standard is […]

If we visit a company that is serious about the Lean Business Culture and watch carefully, we would see this: They have STANDARDS for nearly everything! If we would watch long enough, we’d see that they don’t just HAVE standards; they FOLLOW them! A STANDARD is the BEST WE CURRENTLY KNOW about something. Standardizing means […]