Standardisation
Standardisation has long been the best kept secret of world class organisations - although was largely universally ignored throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Now, of course the term S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure) has passed into common organisational language. Most organisations pay official lip service to their value; most people in those organisations, when they are being honest, despise them as a wasteful and time consuming chore that adds nothing at all of value to the business- and in the majority of cases they are absolutely right.
The problem is that we think of a standardised method as a piece of paper; a document whose production ticks some corporate box of 'good practice' but bears little resemblance to how people actually work and nobody is entirely sure what it is for or how it is used.
In the best companies it's the methods people follow that matter. Though we might need a document to record it, we are only standardised when people perform key actions (assembly, test, setting up and running machines, performing frequent maintenance tasks) to the same established best method in all its important details - regardless of who does the job or on what shift.
Our standard method must be live. It must change in pursuit of improved processes or as the result of countermeasures to problems. All staff performing a given activity need to be continually trained and retrained to perform constantly evolving and improving operations and procedures.
Responsibility for creating Standard Operations belongs with the First Line Manager (supervisor, Team Leader etc). Only they and their team are sufficiently familiar with the detail of the job, and only they can take meaningful ownership of the process, and for drafting, teaching, monitoring and improving the method as part of their remit for quality, safety, productivity and cost control.
The benefits of true standardisation, as practiced in the best organisations, follow:
- Affords the means of transferring real skills rapidly
- Eliminates the 'black art' of processes
- Ensures product and process consistency- eliminates error and reduces variation
- Preserves the operational intellectual capital if the business: puts the 'tricks of the trade into the company domain
- Gives us a starting point: a solid platform for further improvement
- Reconciles process control with rapid improvement
- Ensures that problems once solved, stay solved
