All About Work Standards

All About Work Standards is a practical and utilitarian guide to creating, implementing, maintaining, and improving work standards, the key to continuous improvement. It includes examples from a broad range of industries, and explains the difference between work standards and Toyota Standard Work. The book also explores Leader Standard Work, including its purpose, potential, and limitations. This hands-on resource is essential for practitioners, students, and researchers in lean manufacturing.

Praise for All About Pull Production

Standards are, in my opinion, the most important foundation of Lean and one which is often underrated and given less attention by manufacturing professionals. This is one of the main reasons why implementations of lean manufacturing often fail to deliver their full potential or at all. The discipline of setting and maintaining work standards and standard work is absolutely essential to lean manufacturing. Professor Roser has produced another masterpiece on lean which takes the reader through the different steps of writing, implementing, and improving standards, and with the added bonus of details on related topics such as OEE, TPS problem solving, and line balancing. It is full of practical examples and invaluable advice for the reader, and a must-have for all lean manufacturing practitioners. A superb addition to lean literature. – Cheong Tsang, Bosch Plant Manager (Retired)

Prof. Dr. Roser is an irreplaceable professional in teaching and studying production management systems. He has long experience and much knowledge as a practitioner and a consultant in lean management all over the world. Today he is the most active figure outside Japan in research on the Toyota Production System. Readers will definitely obtain a lot of valuable insights and new ideas from his book on work standards which are often referred to Toyota. – Dr. Masaru Nakano, Professor, Keio University; Former Toyota Manager

Christoph Roser has assembled a veritable encyclopedia in All About Work Standards, featuring standard work and work standard examples from a wide range of industries worldwide. – Mark Warren, Manufacturing Engineer and Production Historian

Christoph has done the operations world a huge service by writing a comprehensive book on a topic of fundamental importance but one that has been inadequately discussed until now. Despite being a foundation stone in the Toyota house, manufacturing standards have long been a source of confusion even amongst lean practitioners. With his customary clarity, Christoph sets out history, types, guidelines, implementation, and pitfalls. How standards relate to OEE and problem solving are the cherry on the top. Superb! – Dr. John Bicheno, Emeritus Professor of Lean Enterprise, University of Buckingham

Coordination of work is the key ingredient for any business success. The better the coordination, the less process wastes. For decades it has been known that there are three ways to realize coordination: standardization, planning, and mutual adjustment. It is also well known that standardization is the most effective and efficient. Still, most literature focuses on better planning and control instead of trying to standardize first. Christoph Roser redresses the balance, which provides a major input for any operating manager. – Matthias Thürer, Professor for Factory Planning and Intralogistics, University of Technology Chemnitz