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 deciding the best we currently know, documenting it in some way, following the standard, and eventually improving the standard as we learn more.

We can standardize many things in business: how work areas are organized, the quality requirements that our product or service must meet, or the safety rules we must follow to avoid injury. In the Lean Business Culture, the most important thing to standardize is the process we follow to to create the value our customers pay for. A “process standard” is the best sequence of steps we know to get a specific job or task done for our customers.

In my early years of working with Lean, I mistakenly believed that STANDARDS were one of the tools in the Lean toolkit. When clients would resist standardizing their core processes, I would eventually give in and move on to one of the other tools.

I gradually learned that standardizing isn’t a tool. It’s part of the foundation of Lean.

As you probably know, Lean was developed by the Toyota Motor Corporation. When Toyota pictures their system, process standards aren’t one of the tools, they are part of the foundation.

My posts in the coming days will focus on standards and their importance in the Lean Business Culture.