Standardizing being permanent obviously defeats the whole purpose of continuous improvement. One of the biggest challenges people put in the way of this is making the PROCESS of making CHANGES too difficult. Then people don’t want to improve because it creates too much work for them. Tragic. Keep it simple.

I think there’s also a fundamental question of how much you standardize one particular task, job, or function in a single site before you go spreading that method (with or without modification).

Even Toyota teaches that standardization is a spectrum — the right point isn’t always completely the same (identical work). There might be some areas in which variation is acceptable and doesn’t impact the customer. Too many people err on the side of standardization meaning “everyone do everything exactly the same way” – especially when done in a top-down way, this doesn’t get much buy in.