A quantitative investigation of Toyota's approach in teaching standardised work

Abstract

Many companies strive to utilise Toyota's standardised work (SW) methodology in attempt to make improvements by stabilising existing operations. Unfortunately, most companies who implement SW fail to understand how it is developed to encourage a specific balance between kaizen and standardisation. In turn, most outsiders perceive Toyota to emphasise kaizen over standardisation which causes many of the unique features and characteristics of SW to be improperly understood. This work utilises latent semantic analysis as a new technique to study Toyota's approach in teaching and developing SW. The findings of this work show that Toyota relies on the principles of the Toyota production system to help teach the achievement of SW. Results also show that Toyota emphasises a number of prerequisites to achieve kaizen to make work more consistent and predictable before improving SW. Other findings show the essential features of SW are strongly related to work analysis and the achievement of quality rather than productivity. The benefits of this work is to improve the way SW is designed and developed to better understand how it is achieved in a lean system.