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What Is Process Standardization?

Standardization People often remark about the consistency of the hamburgers one can get at McDonalds fast food restaurants or about the cleanliness one witnesses these days in public places like the KL International Airport. Think about all the situations where you would like to experience consistent and high levels of quality like these, whether it be at an operating theater or with an electronic appliance that you purchase. Think also about the situations where you have been disappointed by the quality of the service or product you have received - by the handphone that you bought that did not work, or by the error in a key document that caused you interminable trouble.

Underlying these situations and others similar to them, you will invariably find the manner in which work gets done that in turn determines the outcomes in each one of these situations. The ability to reproduce the consistent high quality levels of a service or a product has directly to do with the ability to develop optimum work methods or process and equipment conditions, to codify them, to be able to translate them into effective practices, and then to create the organizational circumstances to gain long term adherence to these optimum methods and conditions.

This is referred to as the Framework of Standardization. Standardization is the ability to realize in practice in the short run as well as in the long run a set of methods and conditions that makes possible repeated high performance.

Standardization reflects the technology level of an organization. As problems get solved, as new uplifting conditions get discovered they are captured in the standards of a company. This codification process freezes these experiences of progress into the memory and long-term capability of a company thus establishing and renewing its level of technology. They are expressed in operating procedures, in specification documents, in drawings, in rules, in infrastructure, in hardware of the company, in software applications and such others.

Standardization enables a significant reduction in the variability that is inherent in situations. It is the failure to recognize the many possibilities for variations those results often in inadequate allocation of resources to the job of standardization. Inadequate allocation in terms of quantity as well as in terms of recognized areas of standardization as in the framework of standardization.

Standardization raises the efficiencies of operations in ways recognized and unrecognized. The establishment and operationalising of optimum conditions and methods is a clearly recognized efficiency raising effect of standardization. The ability to transfer techniques, processes and practices reduces the losses that often occur when such transition occurs. The ability to "make small big" or to proliferate single improvements to institutionalize into larger improvements are examples of effects of standardization that may not be explicitly recognized. The underpinning of organizational discipline is the well-laid out standards setup.

Standardization falls into the category of unavoidable infrastructure, given all of the above and more. Leadership within organizations needs to understand the true role played by standards and to champion standardization within organizations.

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