5S/Standardized Work Supports R&M

Industrial production of malt. A huge vat of malt. Germination of wheat. Drying oats. Barley sprouts.

The first step in initiating continuous improvement is understanding the current process and associated standardized work. It’s upon this baseline of the existing process that new practices are measured and continually improved.

One common way of documenting and displaying what should be done is a standard operating procedure. SOP is a list of established procedures (sometimes using a schematic) to follow when carrying out a specific operation, regardless of who performs the task. Standardized work should be documented, communicated, and posted at the worksite so that it can be correctly followed. Typical items documented in operations are takt time (time to produce parts divided by the number of parts in demand in that time), work sequence, and in-process stock. In too many operations, team members learn on the job and formulate work methods from what they observe. Standardized work provides a foundation of stability and minimal variation on which to build improvement.

A key book on this topic (The New Standardization: Keystone of Continuous Improvement in Manufacturing by Shigehiro Nakamura, Productivity Press, 1993) states:

• Standardization is truly the keystone for ongoing improvement. Without it, your best efforts will be temporary or incomplete.

• Through standardization, we assess our current condition, plan, test improvements, and stabilize at a new level of performance over and over again. It’s that simple.

• Standardization is pointless if it fails to offer useful information to the factory employees.

• Standards are defined as written and graphic descriptions that help workers understand a factory’s most trusted and authoritative techniques and provide knowledge about various production-related themes with the overall aim of making quality products reliably, easily, safely, inexpensively, and quickly.

When you make improvements on a current best practice the changes often result in temporary unstable conditions and/or lesser results. Standardization is required to be able to determine whether the change is beneficial.

Standardized work goes hand-in-hand with 5S/Workplace Organization to continually remove waste and improve practices. Many are familiar with 5S (Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, and Sustain) where teams do group 5S projects discussing and tracking on a team board. There’s a lot that happens within each 5S step. Examples include labeling, floor markings, closer placement of frequently used tools and materials, shadow boards, removing waste of excess parts, a plan for every part, and discipline to follow the standards. Many use a “red tagging” process to highlight changes to be made and areas affected. Together, 5S initiatives and standardized work make up the ongoing cycle of improvement – standardize – improvement – standardize… always improving the existing best practice.

5S and Workplace Standardization can be equally applied with operators, material handling, offices, spare-parts cribs, and reliability and maintenance (R&M) in any industry. A well-implemented standardization process can support and improve R&M workflows, efficiency, and effectiveness. This also supports improvements in productivity, quality, and safety. It can free up floor space, enable easier cross training, increase asset reliability, reduce human error, and eliminate unnecessary movements and time. It makes it easier to detect things that are out of place or not being performed using best practices.

5S/Standardized Work often begins in a specific area of a facility and quickly expands. Most important is that it helps to transition the workforce toward continuous-improvement thinking by changing mindsets to be problem identifiers and eliminators. EP

Based in Knoxville, Dr. Klaus M. Blache is director of the Reliability & Maintainability Center at the Univ. of Tennessee, and a research professor in the College of Engineering. Contact him at kblache@utk.edu.