Destroy Chaos In Your Business With Standard Work!
In this episode, Tom Hughes and Matthew Thompson dive into the transformative power of STANDARD WORK. In the conversation we cover:
The three root causes of errors in the workplace
Why even a loose wire can unleash chaos
The surprising role of standard work in fostering a culture of continuous improvement
The critical importance of documenting methods for task accomplishment
Speeding up operations by eliminating unnecessary steps
How "GembaDocs" revolutionizes standard work documentation and compliance
Practical advice for small business owners eager to implement standard work without breaking the bank
Check it out!
Links:
Book a Lean Made Simple Tour: https://www.leanmadesimple.com/book-a-tour
Send a voice message/question to the show: https://www.speakpipe.com/LeanMadeSimple
GembaDocs: https://gembadocs.com/#home
Welcome to Lean Made Simple: a podcast for people who want to change their business and their lives one step at a time. I’m Ryan Tierney from Seating Matters, a manufacturing company from Limavady, Northern Ireland that employs 60+ people. Almost ten years ago, I came across this thing called “lean” and it transformed my life… now I want to share this message with as many people as possible.
This podcast unpacks our learnings, lessons and principles developed over the last decade in a fun, conversational way that will hopefully empower you on your own business journey — whether you’ve been doing lean for years or are just starting out!
Check it out on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other podcast platform by searching “lean made simple.”
Thanks and all the best.
— Ryan Tierney
Full Transcription of Episode
Tom Hughes Standard work
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Tom: [00:00:00] I found multiple reports that for quality,
biggest contributing factor is human error. So why
is the human making the error? in my mind, there's three reasons.
One, it's a really difficult, process.
The second one is that there's not a clear way to carry it out.
And a third, the person's not trained to do the standardized work properly. Every process should be so mistake proof that anybody could do it.
Matthew: Today, we have an absolute treat. We're back with Tom Hughes. Once again, we're going to talk about all about this thing called standard work and how it is the solution to destroying the three areas of chaos in your business.
Tom, really simply before we get into it. What is standard work, and why should we all care about it?
Tom: We're talking about a clear, documented method of accomplishing a task. It's as simple as
Matthew: that.
And what does that normally look like? Where is that usually stored?
Tom: In most lean businesses We're looking at pictures and little bits of text, step by step, describing how a process is done. Right, and so
Matthew: it's literally so that someone can have it in their hands and they can follow a process perfectly every single time.
Yeah,
Tom: [00:01:00] yeah, we try to stay away from walls of text. Because nobody likes them.
Matthew: Nobody reads them. Yeah, that's the truth. So the three areas of chaos that we're going to look at is number one, defects. Number two, Putting your people in danger and number three, a super slow pace. So let's start off with the first chaos, which is defects.
What are they? Give us an example of defects
you've experienced in your own businesses and we'll go from there.
Tom: Well, at a very basic level, what's a defect? Something that isn't right. So the example I'm going to give you is fairly extreme. Um, so,
in our electronics business, we make these electrical panels for these huge rock crushing machines.
These things are enormous, going in quarries and things like that. And when we were first starting to do that early days, we sent one to the customer and they get it ready to go out the door.
It's the only way it's going to get onto the truck, put our panel on, hit the button, nothing happens. And this is happening [00:02:00] on night shift. There's nobody about, so everybody in the entire customer organization gets to hear about this because the thing couldn't get, it was a scheduled delivery. They couldn't.
put the thing on the truck. So for us, that's a big deal. So we have to get people out there middle of the night, trying to make that all better. But obviously that's not enough. It's not enough just to get it on the truck. So how do you fix that? So the problem we had was we were looking at, it was just a loose wire.
That's all there was to it. And what we did, we already had a, process to put that wire in place properly, but it wasn't enough on its own. So as a countermeasure to the customer, we developed the standard work process where step by step, a second person who didn't build the panel can do this like a service check before it goes out.
So it's documented really in detail. It's probably about, I think it's 25 steps they have to do. Then [00:03:00] we sign individually, both persons, the person who built the panel, the person who checked the panel. It's got a serial number. And since then, we haven't had any issues. Amazing.
Matthew: Uh huh. So you've, you've double locked it.
You've got that quality control in there and the standard work allows you to do that. Yeah. Yeah. I think we can all relate to every business owner listening, putting defects out there and that creeping feeling of stress that creeps up your neck when you get that message
Tom: from the customer. Those are the things that keep you awake at night.
And I did a little bit of research before coming in here today and I found multiple reports that for quality, biggest contributing factor is human error. So why is the human making the error? So in my mind, there's three reasons. One, it's a really difficult, bad process. That, that's a thing. The second one is that there's not a clear way to carry it out.
There's no standardized work, as we talked about. And a third, the person's not trained to do the standardized work properly. [00:04:00] But at the end of the day, how do you, how do you solve the problem? Well, you either have a perfect process. I call them light bulb processes in one of the books I wrote. That should be the objective.
Every process should be so mistake proof that anybody could do it. That should be our utopia where we're aiming for. But while we're not there, then you need your standardized work. The people know consistently how you carry out that task, and they can be trained against it. And that's your basis.
Matthew: Yeah, because defects lead to all sorts of stuff.
We're talking about stress, they lead to, you know, you waste money because you have to replace things. Huge amounts of time to correct your defects.
Tom: Well, like that particular defect,
my business partner Paddy's always talking about this fictitious guy because these rock crushers are going all over the world and Paddy spent some time in Canada.
And Paddy's going, yeah, I don't want the man in Alberta when he goes to operate that machine where it doesn't work, because the things are made in Ireland. You've got a [00:05:00] distribution network where the guy's going to try and get a spare part, but that thing could be done for days, and that costs hundreds of thousands in this environment, and we're only a very small company.
If those guys really come after us for an issue like that, that could be some serious, serious coin. Absolutely. So, we put everything, everything on, all of the things we do have a belt and braces on them. And the, the biggest part of the belt is? Standard work. Standard work. And trained people.
Matthew: I think it's really interesting because,
you know, that one simple loose wire.
it travels all over the world, as you say, and you, where did that example actually happen? Was it like some far flung area in your business? Well,
Tom: the first example, thank God, happened on this island.
Matthew: Oh, still a nightmare, but not as much as the nightmare.
Tom: No, it's not. So, that's a good thing.
But, you know, we theoretically, that wire could have just about been in loose contact when it was sitting in Ireland, goes on the [00:06:00] boat out to Alberta.
Shakes around a little bit. Guy in Alberta hits the button and nothing happens. And then, you know, potentially all hell breaks loose. Yeah, crazy.
Matthew: So much chaos just from one small little thing. Down
Tom: from the loose wire.
Matthew: Fascinating. So the second area of chaos we're looking at is a very serious one, and that is putting our people in danger.
Talk to me about that, and if you have any examples, I'd
Tom: appreciate it. Well Unfortunately, I've got quite a few, because I've been in the industry for 30 years plus, um, probably the worst one, I've only been around a couple of fatalities in my time, but this one, we were an oil and gas, we were making a thing called a hydraulic accumulator, but basically it's a high pressure vessel that goes on oil rigs, and they're generally in a hydraulic panel, and in this particular case, There was one that was 50 bar, and a bar for those that aren't very technical, your car tire has, say, two bar in it.
Okay, wow. And a low pressure one's 50 bar. It's [00:07:00] 25 times your car tire. The high pressure one's 300 bar, and it's on the same panel. And the guy filled the 50 bar with the 300 bar, and the rest is not nice history. And then from that, you get a whole, the first thing that we should be all saying, well, somebody died, that's a bad thing, and it's a product you made, and even though it wasn't something that you did.
there's still an implication for your organization. And in that case, you go through a whole investigation. It's really, really serious. There's all kinds of regulatory authorities involved. There's insurance people, there's all kinds of things going on. And when you're looking at what happened. It didn't happen on our site.
We didn't do it. It wasn't our person, thankfully, but it's still a terrible situation. The guy, it was a human error. So was there a proper standard work for carrying out that maintenance? Big question mark. And was the guy [00:08:00] trained? They're the two questions that they're looking for when they're doing that investigation.
And if you don't have a standard work in that situation, you're in serious trouble. Actually, I can tell you one, another one from my career. Where, in our factory in France, a guy was using a hammer on a, on a, let's say a steel lever, and he didn't have safety glasses on, and he hits the, a little steel shard comes in and he loses his eye.
And you'd think in that circumstance, well, what's the guy, did we, did we have a process that everybody wore safety glasses? Not enough. And our CEO had to go to French court as a criminal in that case. So it gets pretty, pretty brutal. Now, safety standards like that, they're not just a standardized work.
This kind of standard discipline. Is so, so important and that's the basic level within your factory. Everybody [00:09:00] wears PPE, but then when you get to process level, how do we execute those processes and if you don't have a standard and something happens. Bad things happen for everybody involved, both the operator and for everybody in the organization.
It's really serious.
Matthew: Absolutely. And I've heard you say multiple times in different podcasts and books and things like that where, you know, if everything's just up in your head, if it's not in You know, document in a standard work somewhere. You can't improve it. There's no baseline. There's no starting point.
Tom: It's my favorite Lean quote of all time. I have two, right, that are very related. Taiichi Ono, for those of you that don't know what Lean is, he's basically the Lean Daddy. The Japanese Lean Daddy, you can say, right? And one of my favorite quotes that he has is, without standards, there can be no improvement.
And building on from that, I often used to ask people that, what does that mean? For this one, I'm going [00:10:00] to skip it.
My other favorite one is that without standards and improvement is just another source of variation.
That's actually probably deeper because I think that one hurts more because there you are. You've had, I would say, a customer problem and countermeasure in. Right lads, we're going to do it like that from now on.
Week later, another customer call, you've had that again, and like that sinking feeling that like, I've had that.
Unfortunately, I've had that a few times in my career because you've made the promise to the customer. This is what we're doing now. You're not going to have that again. Then you get the repeat concern and you find that your countermeasure wasn't properly in place. And, uh, that used to happen in automotive, when that happens in automotive, like that's serious stuff.
Sure. So I had to learn that lesson pretty, pretty harshly.
Matthew: Yeah. I mean, as you say, it's the, it's the importance of just having it down
Tom: somewhere. And you need the culture to back it up as well. There's no point in just having the thing written [00:11:00] down. You have to have a culture of training and working to the standard.
Somebody new comes on, we train them to the standard. It's also an opportunity to review the standard when you're doing that training.
Matthew: Why do you think people don't follow standards? So you mentioned culture, like what other reasons?
Tom: I did a podcast with a guy who used to work for Amazon Senior Lean Guy on Amazon.
And Amazon spent all this money on this really fancy digital, you know, AI or augmented reality standard work.
Nobody did it. Cause the guy goes,
if I follow that, I can't make my times. So people find their own way to work around it. to make their times. And that's how disconnected the standard is from reality.
And that's the real reason why people don't do it. If the standard doesn't reflect their reality, they're not going to follow it.
Matthew: Whereas if you get the people to write the standards for their own processes, then they're way more bought in. And it's actually probably going to be more accurate.
Tom: 100%. That's the double whammy of that.
You can [00:12:00] see it even more clearly in a small business, I feel. So when we do that in our small business, our guys write their standards, And then they update them and they follow them. If I wrote his standard, seriously, you don't need to be a psychologist to work out what's going to happen. Like, it's just, you know, willfully ignored or, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's, it's really basic.
Matthew: Yeah, cool.
So that kind of leads us to the third and final chaos that we want to talk about, which is a super slow pace, a lack of speed.
Tell me, tell me about this chaos and how standard work can destroy it. This is one
Tom: of my personal favorites in my own business life because we're a small business. Um, I do the monthly financial review. So for cashflow and the sales forecast for next month and all of that stuff. I'm in my early fifties, but sometimes my brain feels like it's a bit older because I don't do it like for another four weeks.
I forget how to do half the stuff, right? So I need to find the age payables, the [00:13:00] age receivables, blah, blah, blah. And it used to take me hours every month to do that until it occurred to me. Why am I doing this? So to quote an earlier podcast, I stopped and fixed. And I created a standard for it. So it took a little bit more time and I created a standard.
This is how I get that piece of data. That's how I get this piece of data. And now I can do that financial review literally in 5 or 10 minutes. And that's really powerful when you're doing that once a month. But the same thing applies if you're doing something that's every five minutes. But now when you look at that process and you trim out all the fat, that's how I describe it these days.
So all the searching and the looking and do we really need to do that? And we ask questions around it and you develop a good standard. You can really turbocharge efficiency. And that goes for every single process you can think about. Once you standardize the work, you can take away all the [00:14:00] thinking and the effort and the struggle.
You get to do that when you analyze it like that one time. Yeah,
Matthew: there's something about documenting a process and staring at the black and white realities of every single step that activates like a different part of your brain that realizes, Hang on a second, steps 4 to 7, why on earth are we doing it that way?
Tom: And when you do that as a team and people do it different ways. That's when the real magic happens. I call it best offs. So like the compilation albums used to get in the 80s. Like, so I do it like this. Oh wow. I didn't think of doing it like that. Right. Okay. We're going to optimize a single method to do it.
So you
Matthew: actually tap into the creative genius of the group rather than the individual. Exactly.
Tom: And that's how the efficiency, that's one of the reasons the efficiency turbocharges. Wow.
Matthew: Something I've been thinking a lot about recently is, there's a quote that says that you need to have time to think about your thinking.
And so often we get caught up in the [00:15:00] actual day to day operations of a business. You don't have that step back to reflect on what you're actually doing.
And I think creating a standard work like that, that's really important. Offers that reflective moment.
Tom: It most definitely does. And the other direct benefit, and I know this as a small business entrepreneur, call me that today, not tomorrow, this time next year,
whenever you're taking those processes that you're doing, especially those admin type ones, and you do your SOP, well, now you're in a free place.
Is there anybody else I can give this to? Is this really the best use of my time? Well, you can't really do that or not easily without having a documented first. So my favorite quote I've heard from a buddy lately is he cloned himself. So the power that whenever you get your standard working place for lots of those things that you were the only one that used to be able to do it.
Yeah. Then yeah, you're setting yourself
Matthew: free. So good.
So standard work. Allows you to do things in the fastest, [00:16:00] best possible way and then make sure that everyone following that standard does it that way.
So you clone your best person across the whole organization and the speed that leads to must be insane.
Tom: Yeah, that's the benefit. I love it, man. But it's one off.
Matthew: Well, I think every business owner listening to this is like, yeah, I want that. I want to get rid of defects. I want to destroy safety issues for my people. And I want to get rid of slowness. Like I want speed in my
Tom: organization. Who doesn't want efficiency?
Who doesn't want productivity? 100%.
Matthew: So talk to me a little bit about your Personal origin story, like what was your life like before standard work and what was the results?
Tom: Well, the most recent part of my career story is Lumen Electronics. So small business, uh, there's myself and the founder and about half a dozen other brilliant team members.
But at the very beginning, everything revolved around Patrick, [00:17:00] probably the best electronic engineer in Ireland. The vast majority of what needed to happen in the company was in his head. So the amount of times we couldn't do X because Patrick's busy, so he's not free to set up that production line.
Patrick's not here to answer that question. And then we have two or three lieutenants and what happened is a couple of them left. We're even worse trouble because that knowledge left with them. So the burden on Patrick went up even more. Meanwhile, I'm the non technical guy. I'm the commercial quality, lean guy, you could say.
And it's so frustrating when you can't get stuff done and that bottleneck exists. Paddy's working 70, 80 hour weeks. Customers are waiting for Project X because Paddy can't get onto that yet. And it's really, really horrible, really stressful. So, we had a pivotal moment where we were launching a new product.
And Patrick said to me, look, I can't do this all again. I need you to document the standards for setting up that production and how we're going [00:18:00] to build that thing. And so that was, I didn't want to do it. But I was the only one standing around it fit to do it, so. Paddy handed me that sandwich and I chomped on it.
But yeah, that was, that was kind of the start of our recent standardized work journey.
Matthew: What did that lead to?
Tom: Well, it is a day and night thing.
So now Patrick next week
is off for a week of silent retreat. He's booked this place out, the West Coast, there's no mobile phone coverage, there's no wifi, no internet, and he's going to just do lots of ultra running and read. for a week on his own and the business is going to go on without him. We had a casual discussion a few months back and uh, it was, when was the last time you had a holiday, Patrick?
He was 18 years old. The last time that he had more than a week off, right? So that's what that, the biggest thing I give my friend [00:19:00] and business partner who really matters to me. Now he's free. He's not totally free, but he's well out, well out of those, you know, sticky muddy stuff.
Now we've got our people.
So it's just a, let's create a standard as just an everyday thing. If anything new is happening or it's likely to be a repeat task. The guys will do a standard work for it, so they'll develop a decent method. The next time they go to do that task, it's going to be easier for them,
even if they're the only one that ever goes near it, right?
So you just get that culture going. Once the benefits start to flow, you get that multi skilled That's the mecca we all want, I think, as business people.
You don't have to have a business that owns you, you own a business,
and you're able to go for your week's silent retreat. So that, seriously, even if any of our customers are listening to that, they'll be like, wow, great, Paddy's having a week off on his silent retreat, because that's what you get.
Matthew: Phenomenal. So I think, uh [00:20:00] I think all of us listening to this were pretty sold on the idea of standard work. And so the million dollar question is like, how do we go about implementing this in our organization?
Because a lot of people who listen to this podcast, you know, yes, there's some big people at Toyota that listen and all that sort of stuff, but it's a lot of small business owners who maybe can't afford to hire someone full time to implement standards and all this. So what hope
is there for us, Tom?
Tom: Well, you know, up until pretty recently, that was the way you had to do it.
Like, I've been the standards guy in a company. Actually, probably a couple of times. Not a nice place to be if you're using the traditional tools. So your Microsoft tools, your Google tools, mobile phone, handwritten notes, back and forward. It's just so painful. And that process is one of the reasons why so few companies have standards.
Less than 2%. Less than 2%. And that's from the business process management report. It's a UK organization. I think that's probably an exaggeration. [00:21:00] The lack of good tools really caused it to be a problem. So I've been the guy in a factory where 70 reading machines, Tom, we need to document all the processes.
I'm spending an afternoon, every single afternoon. Out with the guys, phone, pen and paper, back and forward, running up and down. And honestly, a waste of time at the end of it, because I, they didn't own the standards. Tom did. Not good. So, like, at Lumen, we had all of this.
Whenever Patrick asked me, like, I don't want to do this for the new product.
We're going to have to find a different way. Will you document the processes? I did all of that.
Phone, pen and paper, Excel, a day of work, documented a third of the processing I was expecting him to go, Oh yeah, well done, Tom, you're a hero. And he was like, how long did that take you? Don't you have a software company?
And like,
I've been doing this for years and it took him to ask that question, to trigger that.
There's [00:22:00] gotta be a better way to do it.
How did I not see that before?
So I basically designed all the screens for what is now GembaDocs that afternoon.
We built the prototype in three weeks.
And when I got the prototype in my hand as a mobile phone app,
I knew I had a product.
Wow.
I documented our bathroom cleaning process as soon as I had it. Put it up on YouTube and shared it on a few lean groups. And we had enough money to build the commercial version with paying customers that week. Unbelievable. Like I've been, I've been involved with some digital failures before.
That's when you know you've got a thing. Right. So yeah, that's, that's really changed everything.
Matthew: Unbelievable. And I mean, you, you know, you have something whenever. You're solving such a powerful pain for people that they immediately, as you say, it's in their hand, they're like, this is what we've been looking for this whole time.
Tom: That was the problem.
the root cause why people,
let's say the operators never owned the process, is because they weren't involved, there wasn't a tool.
that facilitated that to happen [00:23:00] easily. So what we did with GembaDocs, and that name was come up with literally like, what do we call it?
Uh, what does Gemba mean? Workplace. Okay. It's as simple as that. Workplace docs. Yeah. Everything happens on the workplace. So you can create it on the workplace. You update it in the workplace. You can access it on the workplace. With the people, or preferably by the people doing the work. So, back to the one guy trying to implement SOPs across the whole factory, which is the normal situation.
Now, you can, as a business owner, you can start the process, right? Let's get GammaDocs. Oh, look, there's the bathroom. Look how easy it is. Get your team leader's supervisor level involved, and you can roll that out in a month. Wow. And I see that. People are doing that all the time. So, that's what that tool's enabled to happen.
We've freed up the resource problem. Yeah. We can do it on the Gamma. You can roll out fast, you can trust the processes because you can update them on the gamma, and it all flows. So, it's been fantastic, and it's not super expensive, [00:24:00] that's the other thing, because
Matthew: Was there anything on the market before this?
Oh
Tom: yeah, tons. Okay. Yeah, tons.
Matthew: And like, like, talk to me,
Tom: price or? Yeah, when you go on there, it's like, you know those websites with no pricing? Oh no,
Matthew: never buy a bottle of wine or clothes that don't have a price on it.
Tom: Like nine out of 10 of them have no pricing, so you have to book the demo. And I've heard anecdotally 30 grand sterling plus for the biggest fish.
Most of the rest of them are 10 plus per site. And, but the best or worst part of it. Uh, we had, uh, a defector from the biggest fish, the 30 grand fish, come to the 1, 500 fish for a really big site, and the reason they came was because I'm the only one that uses it. So, no. So that's the difference. It was pointless anyway.
You're just wasting your money. Right. So. Simple tool that works, that's accessible for everyone there. That's the answer. Cool.
Matthew: So you've actually, you've made a tool that every person at every [00:25:00] level of the organisation can use and it can all happen at once. So instead of me as a business owner taking two weeks out of my time or whatever to document every process, it can just all happen all at the same time by every person in
Tom: each different department.
My favourite recent story was one of the world's biggest oil companies who I can't mention by name. They're using GembaDocs for field oil and gas work in the US and the lady told me I can give it to like a guy in his fifties, a charge hand who isn't tech savvy. I can give him the GembaDocs app and within a minute or two, he's documenting his process and enjoying it.
Yeah. Get that last bit. Crazy. It's actually fun to do. So before. How were they going to do that? So that's the, that's the tool.
Matthew: And you know, we all have a supercomputer in our pocket. Yeah. And so you've just leveraged the supercomputer and now everyone can just one tool, forget the notebook, forget the camera, whip the phone out, snap a photo, couple of notes, get rid of the walls of text that you talked about [00:26:00] earlier.
And you've just made it easy. Man, I love it. Tom, like, we love what you're doing. And, uh, like, Ryan's a big fan of Gamma Docs. And, uh, I know a lot of people listening are really Raven fans.
Tom: Yeah, leave a comment. If you're a
Matthew: Raven fan, please. And how Gamma Docs has turned it all around. That'd be super cool.
Tom, like, you know, we want to support you. We love what you're doing. How can people listen to this get
Tom: started? Yeah, it's really easy. Go to GembaDocs. com and you, or you can download the app GembaDocs. I got a couple of free books that are available on GembaDocs. com as well. So Improvement Starts With I, Great Processes is a how to do SOPs.
All on there. And you can also book a call with me if you really want to. Yeah. You can book a one to one with me. Don't do that unless you've tried the software though, because it really Bores me when I'm trying to, you know, the software is so simple, you don't need a tutorial from me. It's not a good
Matthew: use of my time.
Like, do you pay upfront? Is it free trial or what?
Tom: No, totally free. 30 day free trial, which [00:27:00] is enough time for anybody to gauge. Is it going to work for them?
Matthew: Wow. Amazing. Well, we'll put a link to that in the description, uh, wherever you're listening or watching this. If you want to check it out, you can click there.
Tom, what an education.
Thanks for your time today, man. Really
Tom: appreciate it. Thanks a million. Thanks, everybody.