Lean turn-around expert Art Byrne responding to interview question about ‘Standard Work’ during his leadership at the Danaher Corporation:
“It’s a simple concept – for every job, create a standard and a time frame for it, all the steps in sequence and then you want everyone to do it that way to create a repeatable foundation. It’s not like batch where you just need 1000 a day and that’s the measurement and everyone may do it differently so there’s no consistent quality or productivity. At Danaher, we created standard work everywhere for the new cells and set-ups. But it’s the hardest thing in lean to maintain – easy to write it, hard to get it to stick. We had shop floor management monitor it and had visual controls and posted things like set-up times to make sure it was staying in a range. We had daily meetings around it and what the issues were. It’s a different mentality for both shop floor managers who are used to just focusing on making the numbers, and on the people doing the work who are used to doing it their way. It should also be used as the baseline for improvement – how do we change to the next standard?” 

A Framework for the Development of a Model for Successful, Sustained Lean Implementation and Improvement  Doctoral Thesis by Julie Sisson (2014). https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/4515