Coauthored by Rick Wrinkler and Greg Thompson.

Standard work means determining and documenting the ideal process to produce correct and consistent results. It represents the best sequence and the most efficient methods to perform a process. It is considered a way to achieve the highest possible degree of consistency in any process. The purpose is to ensure that everything is done by everyone in a similar manner and carry out the work that achieves the highest quality, best service, and lowest cost possible.

In the world of Lean Manufacturing, this definition and adherence to Standard Work has resulted in positive, repeatable results in a variety of industries. In today’s Covid-19 environment,  practitioners with years of experience in industry strongly believe that Standard Work will and should be one of the foundational tools to develop, implement, and maintain strategies to combat the Coronavirus in a manufacturing environment.

This is an original article, written by Trim Tex.

The story of every successful manufacturer is one of nonstop self-improvement. What may have been an effective process five or 10 or 20 years ago — or, for a manufacturer with a history as long as Trim-Tex’s, 50-plus years ago — may no longer be the best road forward. To provide customers with the best possible products and services, sometimes it can take a manufacturer shattering its own status quo. And sometimes that may take a little extra education. This is exactly what some folks here at Trim-Tex are doing, by enlisting in Six Sigma “Green Belt” certification training.

This is an original article from the NIST Manufacturing Innovation Blog, written by Brian Hagas. 

Many organizations are maintaining or re-starting operations at their facility. Here are some guidelines that can help you ensure employee safety and proper machine and process startup as you resume operations:

It’s 2020 - a year we will never forget.  The Coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented in its economic and social impacts.  We’ve seen nothing like it and hope to never see it again.  And now that we are in this and expecting to soon get on the other side of this, many questions surround what the new normal is going to look like.

In Richard Koch’s 1998 book, The 80/20 Principle, he makes a rather stark statement reflecting on the events of today. “The tipping point is ‘the point at which an ordinary and stable phenomenon – such as a low-level flu outbreak – can turn into a public-health crisis’, because of the number of people who are infected and can therefore infect others. Since the behavior of epidemics is non-linear and they don’t behave in the way we expect, ‘small changes – like bringing the number of new infections down – can have huge effects…  It all depends when and how the changes are made.”

“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” — William Arthur Ward. 

Maintaining adequate cash flow is a major factor when operating a healthy business in times of growth and prosperity. During tough times it takes on an amplified role. The fundamentals of collecting on receivables, reducing expenses, reducing inventory investment, and the like are still in play, but these and different strategies need to be examined in difficult economic times.

The Defense Production Act may require you to shift production to a different product and therefore you need to rapidly train your team members.  Others may need to reduce their workforce and move team members to other jobs that would require them to learn new skills.  And, some companies are hiring so rapidly that they interview a person, hire them on the spot, and the person is working on the job the same day.  These new team members require to be trained on everything from safety, time keeping, to their actual tasks and everything in between.

What is the post-Covid 19 workplace going to look like? How will companies thrive? In some ways, it could be a very different world from as recently as 2019; or it could be more of the same as the past decade or two. Or the past century. The march of productivity has been going on for a very long time.

COVID-19 has brought the world to its knees! For most people in the world, daily life has been disrupted in an unprecedented way. Besides the awful toll on human life, job losses, business failures, etc. are now becoming more prevalent. The impact on the global economy has barely begun to be measured.