United Flo 
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Standard work is a verb

A playbook for lean manufacturing

Format

Practitioner Presentation

Topic(s)

Overview

As support professionals and process operators work together to establish standard work, ties and communication are strengthened. However, John Allwood discovered during his engineering and management positions that LEAN was not very well understood from the standard work perspective. In this session, Allwood will present the strength of the application and the tools necessary to capture standard work. This session will center on basic lean tools in their applicational elements.

Company

United Flo offers wastewater pumps that suit all needs of customers locally and globally. Its products are made for long-life performance & low maintenance. With over 80 years of combined experience in pump design and manufacturing, the company designs, develops and manufactures its pump lines in the U.S. www.UnitedFlo.com

Presenter

John Allwood was introduced to the Toyota production system while working at Tuthill Pump in Alsip, Illinois, in the 1990s. In 1998, Tuthill Corporation began a ten-year transformation to The Tuthill Business System. Allwood was appointed Tuthill Pump’s change agent early in the journey and served in that role for the next eight years. He then transitioned to a product line manager over an entire value stream, including five machining cells and an assembly cell.

Shortly after, Allwood took his lean show on the road, serving in engineering and management positions, where he found that lean was not very well understood from the standard work perspective, apart from the company where he had spent the previous decade. He also encountered and received training in several lean interpretations, all of which conspicuously lacked a focus on standard work. He has developed creative ways to practice lean and promote standard work upstream as the opportunity has presented itself. Over the years, he has developed a strong sense of what it takes for an organization to transition to an enterprise that is being lean instead of just doing lean things. Allwood is the author of “Standard Work is a Verb: A Playbook for LEAN Manufacturing."