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MANUFACTURING - December
1999 An Un-Standard
Approach to Standards
STANDARDIZED work is absolutely necessary in a lean manufacturing environment but only if everyone understands how to detect smuggling. A Middle Eastern story from the writing of Idres Shah will illustrate my point: Nasruddin used to take his donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw. Since he admitted to being a smuggler when he trudged home every night, the frontier guards searched him again and again. They searched his person, sifted the straw, steeped it in water, even burned it from time to time. Meanwhile he was visibly more and more prosperous. Then he retired and went to live in another country. Here one of the customs officers met him, years later. "You can tell me now, Nasruddin," he said. "Whatever was it that you were smuggling, when we could never catch you out?" "Donkeys," said Nasruddin. How does that apply to standards? Like the border guards, we managers can do everything right and end up missing the obvious. Look at Henry Ford's definition of a standard: "the union of all the best points of commodities with all the best points of production, to the end that the best commodity may be produced in sufficient quality and at the least cost to the consumer." The goal there is signaled in the repetition: best...best...best. Our goal -- obviously -- is not to enforce rules but to make the best product the best way we can. For that, we need the contributions of all our people. Yet if we enforce rigid eternal standards, we turn ourselves and our people into guards who won't see the donkey no matter how many times they look at it. Listen to Henry Ford again: "If you think standardization is the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow, -- you get somewhere. But if you think of standards as confining, then progress stops." There are two key points to remember: (1) standards are not rules and (2) standards are not permanent.
Standards are not rules The problem with rules is that they eliminate motivation and responsibility. Some professors take attendance and use it as a factor in the grade but I don't. Instead, I hold the students accountable for the course content. That way, we are united in our goal -- to understand. If I insist on rules of attendance, we aren't united. Standards should not be rules but guides. Henry Ford stresses this: "It is the work, not the man, that manages." That means the work will teach us the best way to go about it - if we pay attention. However, if someone else tells us what to do, we feel we don't need to pay attention anymore, just follow the rule. Thus, the danger of rules. They take away our responsibility and our motivation to pay attention, to see for ourselves. Someone else has decided to see for us.
Standards are not permanent Standards help us get the continuous improvement thinking we need for lean operations. Or they get in our way. It depends on how we use them. We need standard cycle times for operations, standardized methods for jobs and standardized inventory using the kanban. We can't work on improvements until we have standard procedures to measure with. But each of these standards should be seen as temporarily the best -- a home run record to beat rather than a law to obey without thinking. If we insist on standards as rules, we are telling our people to check their brains at the door.
Dr. Arlie Hall is an adjunct professor for the Center for Robotics and Manufacturing at the University of Kentucky's College of Engineering.
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