GA 298 | Defining Standardized Work with Mike Thelen

Actually, standard work is the current worst way that we know to do the process. When we say it's the current best way, everybody's satisfied with that. They think that's the best way then, and, well, good, we're done. And they don't realize that standard work should change, right? It should evolve and grow. When we look at it as this is the worst way to do it currently, it drives us to think, what's the better way to do it?

Today, I'm excited to welcome Mike Thielen to the show as we continue our AME interview series. Now, I've known Mike for many years and can safely say he is one of the smartest Lean thinkers I have ever met. And today, he and I get a little technical as we take a relatively deep dive into the topic of standardized work. Now, show notes for this episode, which will include links to everything we talk about, can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 298. And if you're interested in learning even more about the topic of standardized work, Gemba Academy has you covered as we have a course dedicated to the topic within our school of lean. Just head over to Gemba Academy to learn more. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Mike, welcome back to the show. We've done videos and stuff with you, but I don't know, have you been on the podcast?

I think you did. We did a podcast a couple years ago. It's been a while.

Yeah, yeah, I. Yeah, I had Richard Sheridan on just a little while ago and yeah, he was on episode three. And now I think his episode will be episode 300.

So three, a little bit of girls.

Good stuff, man. Well, hey, so how's the show going for you so far?

You know, real good. I was like, Amy, I kind of live in the idea exchanges because I like to share ideas back and forth and man, the discussions in those have been just really, really good this year.

So, yeah, you know the drill. We like to kind of begin our shows with a quote. So do you have one?

I do. And you know, standard work is something I like to talk about. It's all part of the problem solving process from a lean perspective. And. And I thought and thought about, geez, which quote do you choose? Because there's a lot of good quotes. And I decided to go with something a little bit obscure years ago, and I mean, years ago, I think we were still in Yahoo. Groups, discussion groups. If you can think back to when that was, there was a guy we were talking about standard work. Everybody says, you know, standard work is the current best way to do a process, and that's how we need to attack it. And everybody's on board. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, that's the way standard work is. And one of the guys and, you know, God forbid, I can't remember who it was, I wish I did because I should have certain should be able to attach the quote to this person. And I really feel bad. Hopefully he doesn't listen to this podcast and go, man, he stole my line. But he actually made a comment in our discussions. He says, you know, we changed our perspective on it. And we said, actually standard work is the current worst way that we know to do the process. And everybody got kind of, you know, there's a lot of vacant space in emails and. And he finally kind of clarified. He says, you know, when we say it's the current best way, everybody's satisfied with that. They think that's the best way then. And, well, good, we're done. And they don't realize that standard work should change. Right? It should evolve and grow. And that quote was then a, hey, when we look at it as this is the worst way to do it currently, it drives us to think, what's the better way to do it? And so I love that aspect. I love that mentality. Hey, let's not call it the current best way. Let's call it the current worst way we know.

Nice. All right. All right, Mike, tell us about your background. Tell us about how you got into this Lean stuff and then tell us what you're up to these days.

Well, I tell you, I spent five years in sales and sales management and, you know, got wearing a suit and tie every day and just, I don't know, I decided to move and change career and just really flip. And I went from first shift suit and tie to third shift area supervisor wearing sweatpants and a T shirt and went into manufacturing. Spent a little over 20 years now in manufacturing. Doesn't seem like that long, but a little over 20 years now. Worked in all sorts of industries. We started playing with Kanban and cell design in 1998, and we didn't really know what it was, but somebody read an article and said, hey, let's see if we can do this. And so we started doing it on the floor. And then about 2005, 2006, you know, been playing with Lean now for about eight years. Thought I was pretty darn sharp. Then I met my mentors who are from Toyota, discovered, wow, I'm really stupid or A lot to learn. A lot to learn, yes. I was still a very young student. I wasn't as educated as I thought and really got the bug then and started reading everything got my hands on. And I spent two years with my mentors and everything just kind of skyrocketed from there. I attended my first AME, I think, in 2011.

Okay.

And ever since then, I've been leading conference sessions or pre conference sessions here. I love the buzz. Right. And the making connections. So I've been at it now for 20. This would be 21 years, technically, since 1998. And a lot of knowledge.

You and John Miller used to run around together, causing all kinds of trouble.

Yeah, I spent three years with Kaizen Institute. So John was there with the last couple years. John was there before he decided he was just going to dedicate all his time and money to you. So you. Yeah, that was a great experience too. Masaki Amai, I mean, wow. He's just. Oh, you know, there's no way to explain getting to meet and be around somebody like that, you know, and so spent three years with Kaizen Institute doing consulting. And, you know, consulting was fun, but I got. It's just nice to be able to go back into a plant. And, you know, today my job now, I work with Steel Partners, which is a private equity firm. We own around 70 plants across the globe. 70, 70 facilities across the globe. And so we travel still. I'm kind of an internal consultant now. Travel all the time. But I'm going into plants where I was there a month ago, two months ago, you know, working with people that I recognize. You know, just last week I was in Hamburg, Pennsylvania, and one of the guys, from an early training session a year, almost a year and a half ago, he comes in, hey, Mike, how you doing? And how's the wife? How are the kids? You know, and there's that. Yeah, Familiarity.

Yeah.

Yep. And that's just something that. From consulting, you never really had familiarity from facility to facility in that angle. So, yeah, I'm back with Steel Partners for a year and a half, back in manufacturing, working with. And working, not just manufacturing, but with sales. Steel Partners owns, you know, financial companies, paper company. Paper, printing companies, manufacturing stuff. Our actual benefactor, our private investment owner, is a sports guy. He's kind of got a thing for sports. So we've got youth sports leagues on the east coast and west coast and soccer leagues for soccer and baseball. We've got baseball heaven up at New York. So it's kind of like. Kind of like the little League World Series. So, you know, it's kind of a fun thing. We get to play with sports programs and coaches and how to make better programs for them from a lean perspective. Oh yeah, it's just. That's the cool thing about Steel Partners is there's so many different avenues, aspects. So very cool. Really cool.

So listen, yesterday, I think it was yesterday or maybe it was two days ago, I was laying in my hotel room kind of unplugging a little bit and I was mind numb, numbingly flipping through LinkedIn, you know, like we all do on our social medias. And all of a sudden I'm like, saw Mike Thielen and I was like, what's he saying about. And ranting and raving about something, standard work and all these comments. And I'm like, whoa, Mike's fired up about. And so I got to reading the comments and all that, I was like, hey, and then I saw you walking through the hall, I was like, hey, what's up with standard work, man? So let's talk about it, man. Let's talk about what was the post about and what motivated it and what's the countermeasure most importantly.

So standard work is really not that difficult to me the way my mentor taught it to me. And of course we called it standardized work and over the years it's kind of been shortened to standard work. But I'm sitting in this discussion group and a lot of people around the room, it's not just a bunch of new people, it's new people and experienced people. But they're all talking about, geez, you know, I take the standard work down to the floor and I can't get the operators to buy in. And I got a 35 year employee that doesn't want to follow standard work because he knows how to do the job and he doesn't need me to come down and tell him how to do it. And I don't know why our standard work isn't working. And you know, everybody's talking about how they use the tool, they fill out the little form and it's got steps and, but boy, nobody wants to follow it. And you know, I'm sitting in that room for 45 minutes and I get a little gung ho, get a little anxious, you know, I get a little excited. So I'm doing my best to bite my tongue and not say anything and finally I raise my hand and I'm like, okay. I see 20 years at this Toyota mentors, you know, my mentor always taught me that standard work Is an agreement on the current best way to do a job. It's designed by the operator working with supervisor. It was designed on the floor. I said, all I hear in here is how come people aren't following the standard work I created for them on how to do their job. You know, that's not standard work. That's work standard. That's engineering telling me how to do something.

Yeah.

And I said, they all. Maybe we all have the wrong definition of standard work from what it should be. And room got kind of quiet. The guy right in front of me turns around to me and says, amen, brother, and puts his hand up. You know, I'm sorry, but it's just frustrating because, you know, my mentor taught me how to do it. And I see so many of these people that they weren't taught. Right. Yeah. They were taught a sheet of paper, but not how to do it. Yeah, Just. Here's the form. Fill this out. So, see, I got a little fired up yesterday and made some comments, ended up having. Having someone from. From outside contact me and asked me if I'd like to write an article on standard work. Yeah. I'm like, sure. Which was a mistake. You know, I haven't written an article. Oh.

Yeah.

I haven't written one for, like, seven years. You know, I've just been too busy to write articles. And so I'm sitting in the hotel last night. I'm sitting up in the room, and I'm thinking, well, this will take me an hour. I went to bed about 12:30 last night. Finally got done with it. Oh, man, that's great. Yeah. It was only three, two and a half pages. It took me that long to write it. I was kind of rewording. Okay, tone it down. You're getting excited. Tone it down. Too much.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, let's.

Let's do the. An audio version of maybe what you wrote, you know, and let's kind of just walk through, you know, the basics of. Of standardized work. So what are the elements?

Okay, so, you know, the way I actually wrote the article last night was I started with definition. Right. It's the current best way between supervisor and operators on the floor. And whether the operator is, you know, machinist or the girl in accounts payable. Yeah. It's who's doing the job, working with their leader to say, this is the way that this job is done. And we both agree this is the steps. This is what we're gonna do.

So let me stop you there for a sec. So what's your take on you know, like within, say, the, you know, there's always a lot of confusion between in the TWI movement, like job instruction and it's in standardized work and how, you know, that might be complementary, but they're not the same. Right. But within ji, we talk about the one best way to do the work, you know, to do the job kind of thing. So how do you, when you're creating this standardized work, what's the relationship between the operator? Because what if they don't know the best way?

Absolutely. So ironically, I even had that in my article, talked about twi because I love twi. That was one of the first things that my mentor told me to work on. I've met Jim Hunsinger, I think once in person. But Jim and Brian Lund used to work for Energizer. I don't know where Brian is now. But, you know, they were really gung ho back in early 2000s on twi. And I remember having communications with them when they were going to the Smithsonian to pull out the original manuals and then digitize them. I have my copy because I reached out to Brian. I was in with that group. I'm like, guys, when you get it, I want it. And I still to this day have the digital copy Brian sent me from what they developed out of that research. The thing with TWI is it's an I do, we do, you do. But I have to know the process first. So I do. We do, you do. And it's learned by working with the shop floor employees who know how to do the process. TWI is great for new hires. Right. Standardized work is good for new hires, but standardized work is also making sure that all my people on all my shifts are doing it the same way. And we're able to repeat. Right. The whole point of standardization is get repeatability.

Yeah.

And so TWI is a great thing for new hires.

Yeah.

But you build that stuff through TWI by engaging the current operators who are the experts at the process. And so that's one of the things I even heard that in that discussion group of we use TWI and we come out and tell people how to do their job. That's not what TWI was. TDI was bring the expert in, develop the process from the expert. And now as a train the trainer person.

Yeah, more than likely as an operator.

Right, right. And I'm skilled in training where the operator skilled in operating.

Yeah.

And so I get is the operator's best way. And then I train new people in the best way that that operator showed Me how to do. Yeah. And that's the train, the trainer aspect of twi.

Got it.

So. So yeah, I mean, that's. It's a great thing because that was one of the big points of TWI is a supporting tool. But TWI isn't all of it. Yeah. So, but you know, we get into that. We got in. I wrote it about the, the definition of what standardized work is and how it is, how it should be viewed versus how I think it has changed. And then I talked about the elements. Right. There's swip, standard work in process, there's taktime, and then there's the work sequence. Okay. Now takt time. And I covered each one of these in the article ironically. Just real high level tak time, you know, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's your customer demand. Right. And one of my friends, actually Scott McDuffie, one of my co workers, he worked with David Mann who wrote Creating a Lean Culture. And Scott, we all give, always give him grief about his Michigan English, but he took tact and went, okay, it's TA over kt, TA time available. So how much time do I have in my plant over the kt in his Michigan spelling of customer with a K instead of a C, but customer take. What's the customer demand? So it's time available over customer demand. And you know, really helps simplify when you're training other people what tact time is. So, you know, there's your taktime, you establish what your demand is. Yeah. Then you. What's the work sequence? What's the actual sequence of work that I, that we have to do to make this product? And then the last one is the standard wip. How much WIP do I need in between processes to be able to maintain flow or, you know, maintain the absence of flow, maintain pull system and that, you know, both internal and external. Right. Because you have internal customers, you might have a heat treat where you got to go out to heat treat in your building and then come back into your cell. So you've got some swip to work in there so that you have coverage in case something happens. But we do the same thing if we have an external process, if we don't have heat treat internal to our facility and we send it to the local subcontractor, then we have that standard whip inside going, going out to that, that external source and then coming back in. So standard work is, you know, those are elements of it. Yeah, that's the key three elements you need to create to be able to do standard work. Because without Any one of those three. You don't know what your customer demand is. You can't balance your line.

Yeah.

You don't know the sequence steps. You don't know where to break when your demand changes. Right. And when you have the, the swift that gives you the freedom to handle things you don't plan on. I mean, let's face it, not everybody has 1% reliability.

Right.

So.

Right.

So yeah, I mean, that's, that's the elements.

I want to talk a little bit about Taktime because I think we underestimate sometimes people understanding taktime. And there's a lot of confusions. I'll often hear people talking about, you know, measuring takt time with us, you know, or a stopwatch or what if I have this many people, you know, on my, my line, how does that impact tack time? And you know, so talk a little bit about some of the misconceptions and some of the, you know, that we don't measure it with the stopwatch. You know, we calculate it. You know, like talk about that.

So, yeah, everybody confuses cycle time with tak time. Cycle time. What's it take to get through a machine or get take to get through the entire process? In my facility, cycle time has no bearing whatsoever on tact. Tact is what customer wants. Right. And if I run a one shift operation, you know, and I have 30 minutes of break or. Yeah, 30 minutes of breaks. So I have seven hours and 30 minutes available.

Yeah.

Okay. It doesn't matter what else I do. That's the best I got. 7 hours and 30 minutes available. Yeah. If the customer demands X number of pieces, it's those pieces, you know, that, that time available divided by those pieces. There's my tactics. Doesn't matter if I have, you know, 18 people sitting there or 12 people sitting there. It's this many seconds in a day that I've got to get.

Yep.

And so when you look at tak time from that perspective, okay, if my tak time is 10 seconds and my cycle time is 20 seconds, we got a problem. I got a problem. I either need more equipment, I need to add shifts, I need to add people. If it's a, if it's manual process. Right. I've got to match my cycle time to the tact time. Yeah. But measuring cycle time is intact.

Right.

So that's one of the big challenges we've seen most organizations is, well, we got cycle time of 10 seconds. Great. What's your customer in? Well, we had cycle time in 10 seconds.

Yeah.

Yeah. Great. But if you only need one every three minutes. Why are you running that machine 100% of the time?

So what about, what do you do then when someone comes to you and says, I never make the same thing twice ever?

You know, so many companies struggle with Steel Partners calls it pqpr, which is quantity Product line. Yeah. Product routing. I've never used that till I got Steel Partners because we just called it something generic, which I remember anymore. But, you know, having it defined as pqpr, understanding what products you have. You know, I worked in a, in a gearbox manufacturer for five years when I had, when I was working with my mentors and, you know, gearboxes. But our standard order quantity was one. We delivered 413 units a day. And they could be any size, shape, gear ratio, anything, steel gear, brass gear.

So they had different cycle times to.

Build different cycle times. You got one that's got to be heat treated, one that doesn't. You got cycle machining steel versus machining brass.

Yeah.

Which is way different. And so we had to say, okay, what's our, what's our pqr? What? Our product families. How long does it take to make that product family? And when we first started, we said, okay, we have five different families that are going in this cell and each one takes their own amount of time in general. Yeah, one might take 13 minutes, but really their range is between 11 and 15. And one is 17 minutes, but the range is 16 to 20, you know. And so we kind of said, here's our product families and we're going to limit because of the number of hours we have in a day based on our demand. And we look back five years and said, okay, five years. And then what do we want to grow to? Yeah, so kind of use that as what we thought we'd have for business. And we said, okay, here's what we can build in each of these five categories. And as we improve the cell, right as we started seeing problems and understanding processes and standardizing our work, we were able to take about a year and a half into it. We went, okay, you know what? We don't need these five lines, any five groupings anymore. We can sell it all, anything in this entire five product family because we've got it all simplified now down to about 14 minutes, give or take a minute. And so now we don't need product families. We've got them all, one big lump sum. So a lot of the challenges, I hear organizations, whoa. I was just up in a room, guys saying, well, you know, we're a hospital and you never know what's going to come in the er? You don't. But there's surgeries, there's band aids, there's burns. Right. You can categorize in a hospital, just like manufacturing. What's my pqpr? What do I see most often? Yeah. And I'm gonna take that. 80%. 80% of ours are burns and. And sutures. Yeah. Okay, then now we got groups. Yeah. We can customize and standardize for that. That group. Yeah. So, yeah, I think.

And I've also seen, you know, just the whole idea of. Back in my. One of my corporate jobs and honestly don't remember was I had a old Danaher, former Danaher guy, you know, so he was real big on his mixed model playbook kind of thing, you know, and. And, you know, it was if, you know, if, if this, then that, you know, so, you know, basically had a book, you know, with, With. With, you know, if tact is this, then. And this is what we do. This is how we respond to it. Right. And how many people are involved, what they do. You know, we're going to get into the components of standard work here in a little bit. But, you know, talking about the dance steps, who does what?

Right. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, if your attack time, if your customer demand doubles, you've got half the time now. So if it's a manual process, you double your staff. Yep. And that's where. And great. We're going to come into the elements or into the components, because the components of standard work then are where I say, okay, instead of you doing 12 tasks.

Yeah.

Now I'm going to take two of you and each of you do six. I've just doubled my opportunity. Yep. So, yeah, using tact to determine who does what in that job. Breakdown is critical.

Yep.

Yep.

So let's get into it. What are the components of standardized work?

So, you know, my mentor drilled these into me so much I can do them in my sleep. And if I don't do them in order, it screws me up anymore.

Do them backwards, Mike.

Oh, yeah, I gotta write them down.

Hang on.

So, you know, highly defined work is. The goal for standardized work is to have highly defined work. And Toyota, my mentor called him the rules in use. Jamie Flinchbaugh from Hitchhiker's Guide to Lean called him something similar, but different. But it was the same mindset. So Jamie and I have a lot of fun conversations because his Chrysler experience used different words, but really the same mentality he had that I had from my mentor. Rules and use is highly defined Work, clear and binary connections, simple and direct flow. And so that highly defined work is really the countermeasure to highly defined work of creating it with standardized work. So your content is your first step. What's the content? What is it to do this job? Let's lay out all the steps to do this job. And that's our first step, is defining content. Second step, sequence. Okay, now that we have all the things we need to do, what's the right sequence to do these in? I can't remember if it was yesterday in one of the discussion groups somebody talked about this lady in her job used to do steps one, two and three. Might have been the keynotes yesterday. Actually, it was with Sheridan, with Chief. He talks about she used to do 1, 2 and 3. It was at one of the insurance companies. And he walked in and she had a balloon above her desk saying that she was an experimenting process. And she said, he went and talked to her and she said, well, it's steps one, two and three, but three is where I find all the errors and they have to go back and repeat two and three. So I just decided to do one, three and then two.

Yeah.

Because I'll capture the errors before I get to that other step. Yeah. And you know, that's the key of sequence, is what's the right sequence? Well, here's the right sequence for today. And what's that sequence look like? Well, hey, you know what this drives the continuous improvement of standard work. Right. Is, hey, this step could be done ahead of time or this step could be done while I'm doing something else. You know, so it's getting the right content and then getting that content into the right sequence. Once you get the right sequence, then it's the timing component number three, timing. Without timing, the content and sequence don't provide any value. Because standardized work, it's an agreement between the operator and the supervisor, but it's also the methodology for an operator to self direct. Yeah. Okay. If I'm not able to meet this standard work, instead of waiting for you to come and discipline me because I'm not performing. Yeah. My goal should be, I'm not meeting this goal. I'm gonna go get the trainer.

Or maybe pull the end on.

Yeah, I'm gonna pull the end on, say, I need help. I can't do this at this speed. Why can't I do that?

Yeah.

So without the timing, they don't know what the expectation is. Yeah.

If they're winning or losing.

Yeah. You know, it's like playing a game. Without a scoreboard. Right, right. Who wins in the end? Oh, guess what, Ron, you lost. Sorry. So it's really driving that timing that says this is how long each one of those steps take in sequence. Okay. So now I can self direct. It also drives the leader then into leader commish by leader. You know, the leader standard work. Leader process auditing. Yeah. Because now I can grab that standard work. I can look at the timing of it.

Yeah.

And I can watch and observe you. And I can see, okay, Ron struggling with step four. Took him a bit longer than everybody else. Now I know where to coach. Yeah. Not. Not go out and tell Ron he does a bad job. And boy, you better get your act together. I'm gonna fire you. But now I know where to coach Ron to make him better employee.

Right.

So having that timing gives both the leader and the operator power to understand how to get the job done.

Yeah.

Right. Then the fourth one is location. And a lot of processes. The same person does the job the whole way through. So everybody's like, oh, location, that's stupid. I stand at the desk and I do the work. But to your point about tact, what happens when tact has to be cut in half?

Yeah.

And now I've got to double the throughput. Yeah. And now all of a sudden, hey, maybe operator one is doing steps one, two, three here and then stepping across the aisle and doing step 7, 8, 9. Yeah. And the second operator is doing 4, 5, 6 in the middle of the process. Kind of the U shaped cell mentality of processing. So the location is important to know. Hey, you do these steps here, These steps here, along with your standard whip. Right, right, right. Built into it, what's there. So it covers when you have to make the moves. So. And then the fifth one is outcome. Okay. And that fifth component is. Is as critical as anything because the outcome is where you're saying how long it should take to do it. How do you make a high quality part in the safest way possible, meeting that customer demand? Right. So there's my expected outcome. It should take me 77 seconds. And you know, the highlighted areas are quality areas. The highlighted areas in red are quality. The highlighted yellow are safety to be aware of. So I don't cut myself or do something foolish and that drives the whole thing to make sure that what I'm producing is a good quality part ready for the next person. Because we don't want to pass on bad quality. Right. We want built in quality.

Yeah, Got it, got it, got it. All right. Talk about, well, You've already talked about who makes it. I think it's operator concert with supervisor, you know, maybe even an engineer or two, I suppose.

Right, absolutely.

Get involved here and helping us to identify the best way.

Right. A lot of times you bring in quality because the quality people are the ones that, you know, we do an exercise where our quality folks are given one direction and our participants in our little simulation are given another and just to drive the plane home. That a lot of times quality, believe it or not, and even to this day and age, quality has different specs than we do because they have the customer spec and we have what operation says is okay to pass. Yeah. And so, yeah, that standard work, if you can involve cross functional team, the engineer has to have some say. He's got work standards, he's got ISOs, ISO certification stuff to worry about. He's got ANSI or other requirements, BABT for, you know, used to be old British approvals board for electronic stuff. They know those specs that have to be part of the job so that you're doing a quality part.

Yeah.

So, you know, it is an agreement between the operator and the supervisor so they can both use it to move forward, but everybody should be involved in building it and have input to it. It's just that it's got to make sure that it's operator driven. Yeah. Not driven by the engineer telling the operator what to do.

Yeah. So yesterday we were, as we were preparing for doing this interview, you said, oh, yeah, I got my quote. And I said, danny can't use without standards. There can be no kaizen. Right. Because everybody uses that one. But related to that quote, you know, we need standards so we can make improvements. If we don't have standards or a standard way of working, we can't ever make it better.

Right.

All right, so when do we make it better? How often should standardized work be updated, be improved? What do you think?

So the obvious answer is, anytime we see a better way, we make the make the improvement. But my mentor and I remember this. Probably one of the hardest lessons I learned with him was he would walk in and say, all right, how old is your standard work? What do you mean? When was the last time you guys updated it? Six, seven months ago. Then it's not standard work. Standard work should change every three to six months. Otherwise you're not improving. And if you're not improving, you're dying. I mean, he was really, boom, you know, like, wow, thank you very much. Great to know. So that's always been my motivator. Is it should. It should change anytime you find a better way. Yeah, but you should be finding better ways within three to six months. Your standard work should never be longer than that, otherwise you're not improving your process.

Wow, that's good.

Yeah. And it motivated our operators to have more control of the standard work process. You know, the old days, if you change the way work was done, it had to go up to engineer and they had to sign off and they had to go over to production management. They had to sign off.

Yeah.

Standardized work controlled by the supervisor and the operator. So we find a better way, we make sure safety, quality are met and we sign off and make the change.

Yeah.

You know, so much different perspective. You know, work standard is what I call more of what engineering does, which is this is the way the product has to be done to meet qualifications. And that doesn't change over time, you know, unless building codes change or things like that. Yeah, but standardized work should be changed often. Yeah, so. And that's a big challenge. I mean, I walk into our.

There's a lot of things that need to change there. I mean, think about a standard work combination sheet. You think about a standard worksheet.

The worksheet, the work chart, the job. And the job element is the piece that most operators use. Right. Because that's the visual picture of steps in sequence. Yeah. But yeah, you know, you've got to update your combination table. You got to update your work balance chart.

Yeah.

You know, did I just shift more weight to you instead of me, in which case I really didn't gain anything.

And you got to really test it. Right?

Yeah.

You know, make sure it's, it's, it's, you're not missing something.

Yeah. And that's all that engagement. Right. That's all that respect for people. And, and that's, you know, in my article, I really got on a tear last night, which is why I was up till midnight. But I even talked about what are the, you know, what, how do you know when standard work is successful? One of which is that it's changing every three to six months at least. You know, you're changing regularly, improving regularly and getting better. Another is it's a self diagnostic. Your actual operators are using it to say I have a problem and pulling that end on before it's too late. And, you know, I talked about a lot of this stuff, you know, about driving respect for people, feeling empowered to make change to your job, to make it better and getting away from that mentality of, you know, and a bad lean Implementations. Right. Oh, all they make us do is work harder. They took three guys away. Now you do the jobs of three guys.

Yeah.

Standardized work and Lean is about making it smarter. Right. I'm going to give you more structure, which saves time. Yeah. And so you can get more done, but not by giving you more to do, but by reducing a lot of time it takes to do it.

Yeah.

So, yeah, it's kind of neat because I talked a lot about that in the article, but, you know, this is really empowering people, respect for people, engaging.

When's this article coming out?

I actually haven't given it to ID6Sigma yet, so this is kind of a new to I6 Sigma.

Oh, I6 Sigma. Okay.

Yep. Yeah.

Cool. Well, this episode will go out and a month or so, so maybe they'll have it up by then. If they do, we'll link to it. Yeah. So, good.

Good, good, good. Let's see.

I mean, is there anything else you want to talk about as it relates to standardized work?

Oh, sure. You throw that clause in. It's got to relate to standardized work or anything. It doesn't have to be that, you know, that's not your. That's the challenge, isn't it? I mean, I'm such a junkie. I could talk for weeks on Lean and run out of. Poor Greg would run out of recording time with me there. So, you know, it's just, you know, want to thank you for letting me chatter on about standard work and get on my soapbox a little bit. Yeah. Rant and rave.

Well, it's good, you know, listen, you know, in this age of, you know, what's new and everything's. There's all these new things coming out. Sometimes we got to get back to the foundation of what this stuff's all about. And we can have all the. I don't even want to use any other buzzwords out there, but, you know, we can all imagine what they all are, but without some of these foundational things like standardized work, like 5s, I mean, they're not the sexiest things around, but listen, if you forget about them and push them to the side, trouble is coming.

Oh, yeah. You know, there's a reason why standardization is at the bottom of the TPS house. Yeah. It's foundational.

Yeah.

And you can't bypass it.

Yeah.

Yep. Yep.

Awesome. What's the best way for folks to connect with you?

Mike, you know, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm. I tell people, even at these conferences, I say, please don't give me your Business card. Because within 20 minutes, your business cards in the trash.

Seriously.

You know, I'm on LinkedIn and LinkedIn is my connection. It's my contact list. Yeah. So I do LinkedIn a lot. And then the other one is, you know, I work for Steel Partners. My email I always like to share and is M T H E l e n steelpartners.com steel is s t E E L. Right, Right. Yep. Yeah, the iron, not the theft. Got it. So, yeah, that's good. Important distinction. Yep. But we don't steal. We don't steal. No. That's my baseball players. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I was taught years ago, right? The old school swipe mentality. And I share this when I do training and people look at me and I said, I'm always open to swipe swiping is stealing with integrity, pride, and enthusiasm. Oh, I like that. And I share everything freely. So people have questions. You know, I, I'm one of those crazy people. I love Dan Markovitz. You know, Dan Factory of one. I'm not quite as diligent with my outlook as he is, but you know how to inbox zero no, but I have 10 or less. That's my goal at the end of every day is 10 or less. So. And my general is if I'm not on vacation and it's not the. I tell you What, I have three kids, so weekends are not work, but within 24 working hours. So you email me on Friday, Monday, usually within a day, I get back to answer any email. So we got a few.

So many thousands of people listening to this right now. So everybody go email Mike right now.

I gotta call my boss. I need a couple days off just to answer email here.

Yeah, great, that's great. All right, Mike. Well, hey, thanks for coming on. It's always a pleasure. Always enjoy chatting with you. Keep up the good work.

And yeah, man, I love Academy and it's great. Ron, you know, I've been. Been hanging around with you for probably what, 10, 12 years now.

You were, you were hanging around before Academy was cool, man.

I have, I have old cheesy videos of Ron doing, telling us what 5s is, man. Let me tell you. So I, I, you know, love again, love what you guys have done. Always glad to be a part of it. So.

All right, appreciate it, Mike. Take care. Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now we invite you to take a no strings attached, fully functional Test drive of Gembaacademy.com Gain immediate access to more than a ,Thousand Lean and Six Sigma learning resources, all free of charge at Gembaacademy.com.