Many interesting and sometimes heated debates about standardization brought new readers to "The No Tool Zone" this past month.  The challenge is to differentiate manufacturing from service. 

Early in my career I sold SPC equipment to manufacturers around Indiana, Kentucky and Illinois.  I understood the value of standardization in manufacturing and reducing variation.

But as I got involved with improvement efforts in service, I found that despite all the standardization we were implementing that service wasn't improving.

I had the good fortune of reading Freedom from Command and Control and the connection was almost immediate.  The problems John Seddon was speaking to were the same ones that I was having and had no way to measure it.  The word failure demand has become a staple in my vocabulary and it should yours too - "demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer" should be branded in our brains.

Once I began to look at failure demand and trace it back it was (in varying parts) because of standardized things like scripts, procedures and processes.  The problem was not standardization, but variety of the demands coming from customers.  All the efforts to get consistent service were making things worse.

Further the management assumptions about standardization being good continued the cycle of despair for service.  Standardization became a system condition for poor service caused by poor management thinking.

As I have gotten deeper into the Vanguard Method, I appreciate the human change methods that accompany it.  While most of my improvement efforts have always been to hope management would see the light, this method has ways to change thinking and make sure that the whole system changes and not just the front-line.  Management has to change too . . . and the benefit in service is not 2-3%, but 20-60% improvement to the bottom-line in weeks, not years.

All for changing thinking.  Hard to believe, I know.  But once management and worker alike see for themselves the potential for improvement by performing "Check" the proof is self-evident.