Imagine a manufacturing environment where production suddenly stops due to an equipment malfunction. The veteran operator, who has seen this issue before and knows exactly how to fix the problem, is unavailable – in the midst of a two week vacation, sipping margaritas on the beach, while production grinds to a halt. It’s a nightmare scenario, one most companies would do anything to avoid.
Thankfully in the manufacturing world, we use standard work to share knowledge and create specific standardized processes for completing tasks. Standard work is an essential component of producing consistent, quality products.
In today’s blog, we are going to discuss the concept of standard work, and how it can help your organization to organize its collective knowledge and foster an environment where efficiency and consistency rule the day. Let’s dive in!
What is Tribal Knowledge?
Before we dive into the benefits of standard work, we want to take a moment to explore the concept of tribal knowledge.
For many organizations, their knowledge falls into two broad categories – explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge.
Explicit knowledge includes all the officially documented processes and safety procedures that an organization uses. It is information that is easily and readily shared in documents and training manuals.
Implicit knowledge comes from personal experience over time. When this experience fails to be formalized, and remains solely in the individual’s head, it becomes known as tribal knowledge.
Nearly every organization accumulates tribal knowledge, meaning the collective sum of knowledge that accumulates with experience in the workforce over time, yet remains undocumented in the organization’s standardized procedures.
Another word for tribal knowledge is institutional knowledge, or tacit knowledge. Tribal knowledge can be passed down informally by word of mouth, mentorship, or on the job training, but the defining characteristic of tribal knowledge is that it is not formally documented in the company’s standards and procedures.
The Risks of Tribal Knowledge
So is tribal knowledge a bad thing? Not inherently so, but it comes at a cost. By its nature, tribal knowledge is limited to those who have honed it over the years with experience, and those they deem worthy of sharing it with.
When tribal knowledge fails to be converted into explicit knowledge, that knowledge essentially becomes lost when the gatekeeper of that knowledge falls, goes on vacation, or leaves the company altogether.
It is an experience that has caused organizations immeasurable headaches over the years. Without standardizing that knowledge, it goes out the door when they do. And when that knowledge is gone, someone else on the line will need to step up and figure out that knowledge all over again – a concept known as “rework”.
This is a concept that many workforces are facing. As more and more of the baby boomer generation reaches retirement age, failure to document the tribal knowledge that has accumulated in the workforce over many years will inevitably lead to a marked decrease in efficiency and productivity, as you are forced to rework problems that had been solved years ago.
So what is the solution to this?
Standard Work: The Solution to Tribal Knowledge
The answer, of course, is to document that tribal knowledge, a process known as standard work.
Standard work is part of an approach to continuous improvement that looks for the current best way to perform a specific task. Once the best method has been identified, it is formalized and documented.
By formally documenting a process step-by-step, standard work transforms implicit, tribal knowledge into standardized, explicit knowledge that can be easily shared with newcomers and existing team members alike.
It’s a critical step in ensuring that valuable information and experience is codified so that it remains accessible, even when senior team members depart the organization. This has a direct impact on an organization’s consistency and quality of work.
Key Elements of Standard Work
There are three key elements used in standard work to document procedures. They include documenting:
- The Task – A clear definition of the work that needs to be done.
- The Method – The most efficient way to perform the task, with the highest quality result.
- The Time – The standard amount of time it takes to complete the task.
By applying this formula, you can ensure that tribal knowledge will not only remain within your organization, but will be easily accessible to teams and newcomers alike.
Benefits of Standard Work
When you take the time to standardize tribal knowledge, your organization will see a variety of benefits including:
- Increased Efficiency – Process optimization cuts down on wasted time, materials, and reduces the time taken to complete tasks.
- Improved Quality – Consistency directly relates to increased quality, with fewer product defects and happier customers.
- Lowered Costs – Less material waste and less wasted time reworking problems directly reduces costs.
- Improved Safety – Optimized procedures help minimize safety risks.
- Easier Onboarding – When procedures are well documented, new employees can quickly learn the right way to do things.
- Minimize Knowledge Drain – When senior team members depart, their knowledge is preserved, and team members are better prepared to step into more demanding roles.
How Standard Work Can Be Implemented in Your Organization
As noted earlier, the definition of standard work is the current best way to perform a specific task. That means that standards can and should change over time.
Therefore, it is essential to regularly apply standard work to your procedures to ensure that you are doing things the best way possible. To illustrate how this can be achieved, we’ll examine a hypothetical case of implementing standard work.
An auto manufacturer’s assembly line has run into bottlenecks when its most experienced lead suddenly falls ill. In order to minimize the bottlenecks, the organization uses standard work to improve the conditions leading to the bottlenecks. Here’s how they do it:
- Begin with Process Analysis – Every part of the assembly line process is broken down into individual tasks, and analyzed.
- Time Study – As part of the analysis, each task or step in the process is clocked to produce a standard time for completion.
- Best Practice Identification – Interviews are conducted with line workers, including the lead, to discover the most efficient ways for completing each task.
- Stand Work Creation – The best practices are documented with step by step instructions, checklists, and visual aids to create standard work instructions.
- Training – Once new standards have been finalized, the workforce is trained on the optimized standard work procedures, ensuring that consistency is maintained when the workforce changes.
- Continuous Improvement – Feedback is sought from workers, and regular audits of the new procedures are conducted to identify future areas of improvement.
By following these steps for implementing standard work, the auto manufacturer has improved their consistency, and quality, eliminating the bottlenecks they encountered when team members are absent.
Conclusion
By standardizing work, the silos built by tribal knowledge are broken down, creating a more streamlined and efficient work environment. Entire teams can now benefit from the knowledge and experience of long-time employees, while the organization as a whole benefits from improved quality, safety, and efficiency.
If your organization is feeling the pangs of tribal knowledge, contact Manex and let us help you unlock your organization’s potential.
Manex has helped countless manufacturing organizations in Northern California achieve greater performance and profitability through a focus on standard work and continuous improvement.
Let Manex help you implement a standard work system built to meet your specific needs. Contact us today to begin your consultation.
