Warning to Reader: This piece has a lot of free-association flow to it!
Oops. A few weeks ago a story emerged in the press that a B-52 had flown from North Dakota to Louisiana with half-a-dozen nuclear armed missiles under its wing. The aircrew thought they were transporting disarmed missiles. This is a rather major oh-oh [...]
The textbook purpose of visual controls is “to make abnormal conditions obvious to anyone.” But do your visual controls pass the Sticky test, and compel action?
Simple: Does your control convey a single, simple message? Or does it “bury the lead story” in an overwhelming display of interesting, but irrelevant, information. According to Spear and Bowen [...]
This photo could have been taken anywhere, in any factory I have ever seen. The fact that I do not have to describe what is out of place is a credit to the visual control. It is obvious. But one of my Japanese sensei’s once said “A visual control that does not trigger action is [...]
“Stop the line if there is a problem” is a common mantra of lean manufacturing. But it is harder than first imagined to actually implement.
The management mindset that “production must continue, no matter what” is usually the first obstacle. But even when that is overcome, I have seen two independent cases where peer social pressure [...]
As I said in a
previous post, I am spending the majority of my time in China right now.
As part of his preparation for attending a corporate class, one of my kaizen specialists was reviewing some of the training materials. From the other side of the cubicle wall he asks “What is ‘hoopla?” Although his [...]
On a cloudy morning a few years ago I started my truck, turned on the headlights and noticed one of them was not working. While changing a headlight isn’t that big a deal, I needed a state safety inspection anyway, and I really didn’t want to mess around under the hood.
So I called the auto [...]
SME: The Essence of Jidoka
This link is to an article I wrote for the SME online “Lean Directions” site back in 2002. I am including it on this site for the sake of completeness. I noticed that the Wikipedia article on the same subject is largely plagiarized from this, which I simply consider flattery.