A study for standardized work suitable for smaller enterprises

Abstract

Many smaller-sized manufacturers have a production system such as "individual production" and "production of many models in small quantities." In these enterprises it is necessary to make good use of workers for processing or inspecting work and reduce the equipment investment cost. In order to raise the quality of work requiring workers, it is effective to conduct work improvement such as movement improvement and operation loss improvement. Smaller enterprises, which are forced to take "production of many models in small quantities" or "variable product and variable production," cannot make good use of the existing work management methods. In order to improve movements and operation loss, it is necessary to define standardized work beforehand and compare it with the actual work. However, there have been few studies or reports which clarify the making procedure or method such as "how necessary information should be sought" or "in which order the standard should be made." Therefore, how to find standardized work was examined in this research. For that, three kinds of cases were investigated, and the process for standardized work was discussed: one kind was that standardized work, which was already defined, was not practiced, another was that standardized work was not defined, and the last was that a QA network was made with quality guaranteed. In this paper is reported the process for finding standardized work, that is, how to define and make good use of standardized work tables and standardized work combination tables based on the investigation results.