Training Within Industry (TWI)

Have you ever wondered how to sustain Kaizen? How to make people adopt Lean activities willingly? The answer lies in TWI as it helps getting employees quickly trained on a variety of jobs, getting employees to think proactively about their jobs and having supervisors deal positively with personnel situations. 

Training Within Industry (TWI) is a proven workforce development program originally developed in the United States during World War II to rapidly train unskilled workers for industrial production. Today, TWI is a foundational element of Lean manufacturing and continuous improvement systems worldwide.

TWI provides a systematic approach to sustain changes and continuously improve by

• Cultivating an “improvement” mindset in employees
• Teaching people how to identify opportunities for improving their jobs.
• Training people how to generate ideas to take advantage of these opportunities.
• Showing people how to get these ideas into practice right away.
• Creating ownership for people to maintain standard work.

Lean and Kaizen provide countermeasures to eliminate the waste of time and material but TWI provides a solution to eliminate the 8th waste of underutilized people.

TWI is a key strategy to implement operational excellence projects and sustain performance of lean kaizen projects. We focus on implementing a Job instruction module to rapidly develop skills of team members to implement actions from Lean Kaizen projects. JI focuses on developing a well trained workforce resulting in less wastage, rejection & rework, fewer accidents, and less tool & equipment damage.

Job instruction works on the principle of “If the worker has not learned, the Instructor has not taught.”

Job instruction module is blueprinted 4 steps method to transfer the skills using ‘Learn by doing’ approach 

• Preparation – make the learner think to aid comprehension of the new idea or training topic
• Presentation – present the steps (what to do), key points (how to do) and reasons (why to do) to learner
• Application – train the learner to apply what was presented and check results.
• Testing – test the ability of the learner to apply the new idea alone