ABSTRACT
This chapter covers how to identify the categories of work within a specific job title. It is imperative to include representation from the job being reviewed, across shifts if necessary, on your cross-functional team, to ensure optimum information exchange. The purpose of this chapter is to capture the tasks that are performed by the work group, even if these tasks are not viewed as being within the normal scope of work expectation. This step will set the foundation for your data collection categories that will be used in the master yamazumi later, so it is critical that the tasks are identified correctly. (See Chapter 1: Work Combination Table section for definition of yamazumi.)
The first stage of the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle that was defined in Chapter 1 is to identify the current work categories; this would be considered part of the Plan stage. It is very important that we understand what the current Standard Work categories actually are, not what we think they are or what the work instruction or engineering routing says they are. This is why cross-functional groups are so important when launching a noncyclical Standard Work exercise. It is required that you have a minimum of one representative present from the noncyclical process under
study; more than one is better because the information will be more representative of an entire group. Further, if you have multiple shifts, you should have at least one representative from each shift. After all, you are trying to determine the current state and, the more accurate the information you have, the better results you will receive from your data collection, which drives the decision-making process of improvements.
