Implementing Standardized Work

This book, the first in The One-Day Expert series dedicated to Standardized Work, is about operator performance measurement. Implementing Standardized Work: Measuring Operators’ Performance explains how to measure the performance of operators quickly and simply without sacrificing accuracy.

Detailing how to identify the most efficient operators and how to monitor their improvement over time, it describes a method that has been applied with success for years in the automotive industry. Grounded in one of the basic laws of factory physics―mastery of variability―this method can be automated very easily and thereby requires no labor consumption.

In this episode of The One-Day Expert, Thomas, a plant director in an industrial group, is reassigned to another plant that is losing money. Morale in the plant is very low and the staff is pessimistic about the plant’s future and is distrustful of senior management. Thomas’ urgent mission is to turn the plant around. Previous plant managers have tried several initiatives with limited results.

To face these challenges, Thomas has decided to use Standardized Work deployment to achieve quick and visible results while rebuilding a real team. This book recounts these initial steps of the Standardized Work deployment. It explains how to find and apply the best operational method that will lead to cost reductions, better product quality, and increased operator safety. Additional steps will be detailed in forthcoming books in the series.

Alain Patchong is the Director of Assembly at Faurecia Automotive Seating, France. He also holds the title of Master Expert in Assembly processes. He was previously the Industrial Engineering Manager for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa at Goodyear in Luxembourg. In this position, he developed training materials and led a successful initiative for the deployment of Standardized Work in several Goodyear plants.

Before joining Goodyear, he worked with PSA Peugeot Citroën for 12 years where he developed and implemented methods for manufacturing systems engineering and production line improvement. He also led Lean implementations within PSA weld factories. He teaches at Ecole Centrale Paris and Ecole Supérieure d’Electricité, two French engineering schools. He was a finalist of the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences’ (INFORMS’) Edelman Competition in 2002 and a Visiting Scholar at MIT in 2004.