Standards in an Improving Environment

 

Today's theme is standardized work. What is a standard? It is a basis for comparison.  Some well known and common standards include time (minutes, seconds, hours), weight (pounds, kilograms) and  distance (yards, feet, meters).  We use these standards daily to compare one item versus another.  For example this is longer than that, or this is lighter than that.  The important thing to remember is that without a standard there can be no improvement. This is because we have no baseline to compare the improvement against.

Healthcare as an industry,  is very weak on following standards. Many activities are optional, or of guideline in nature. This generates a lot of waste caused by variation in process. The Mayo Clinic reported in a research project that ~50% of the wastes in their health system were caused by an unassignable variance in physician practice. The Institute of Medicine reports that only 54% of all patients are managed according to the best evidence. This means that almost half of all patients are not getting the highest quality, safest care.

In industry, we don't often see much better.  Variation exists part to part, and operator by operator leading to tremendous losses in productivity, throughput, and lead-time.  We similar variation in our service industries. 

Can every action be guided by a standard? If we new the source of all problems, my answer would be yes. However, since the source of all problems is sometimes extremely difficult and expensive to discover we would be unwise in not using some combination of heuristics and judgement.

However, I was taught and firmly believe that 80% of all our work activity should be following a standard. As you look around your work areas, how many items can you identify that are governed by a standard? I would challenge you that it is no where near 80%.

If you are having problems in the workplace leading to poor quality, long lead-times to service customers, and cost above budget, a great place to start is creating a standard as a platform from which to improve.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw

www.breakthroughhorizons.com 

 

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