ABSTRACT
In The One-Day Expert series dedicated to Standardized Work, Thomas, a young, high-potential plant manager in an industrial group, is reassigned to a plant that is losing money. Previous plant managers have tried several initiatives, with, to say the least, limited results. Thomas’s urgent mission, which sounds like the EMEA,* senior management’s last card, is very simple: turn the plant around. The morale in the plant is very low; the staff is equally pessimistic about the plant’s future and distrustful of senior management. Time is running out; company’s headquarters needs concrete results and has become impatient. To face these challenges, Thomas has decided to use Standardized Work deployment to achieve quick and visible results while rebuilding a real team. To this end, he has requested the support of Daniel Smith, the industrial engineering manager for EMEA. Daniel has been with the company for only a couple of years, after previous experience in the automotive industry. Building on his previous experience, he recently designed and launched a Standardized Work initiative and is looking to prove the real power of Standardized Work by deploying it in several plants.
