5S: Treating Workers like “Surgeons”
"It is useful to think of the operator [worker] as a surgeon. Obviously, a surgeon needs to focus completely on the patient. The last thing you want is the surgeon…
“5S” makes Work Areas Safe, Productive, and Reliable
"The objective of workplace organization is to create a functionally organized work environment and not to simply give the appearance that things are organized." Lean Office and Service Simplified by…
More Standards = More Creativity??
"The paradox of Lean is that the more structure and standards you have in place, the more flexible and creative you can become." Flatlined: Why Lean Transformations Fail and What…
Who Has Permission to Change Standards?
"At Toyota (like most other manufacturers), there are certain standards (safety, equipment settings, quality tests, etc.) which are determined and set by various professionals. The question comes up, how can…
Who “owns” Standardized Work?
"Toyota does not want individual employees to 'own' their standardized work, and uses job rotation so no one employee owns any one job.… Once the process is operating at some…
Definition of “Standardized Work”
"By "standardized work," we are referring to the most efficient and effective combination of people, material, and equipment to perform the work that is presently possible. "Presently possible" means it…
Standardized Work: Baseline for Improvement
"Standardized Work is a concept that is often misunderstood in the context of the lean journey. Many times we have heard the comment that standardized work is going to make…
Flow: Challenging People to Think and Improve
"Toyota's vision of any process is true one-piece flow that is waste-free. Creating flow means linking together processes that otherwise are disjointed. When operations are linked together, there are opportunities…
The Ultimate Competitive Advantage: Teamwork
“Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology.It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage,both because it is so powerful and so rare…If you could get all the people in an…
When People Point out a Problem
"None of us like to see reality when it's unpleasant or disappointing; all of us are guilty, at least to some degree of wanting rose-colored glasses. This is not an…