M4E #11: Jidoka and how to avoid passing on defects in the production chain

Time to get back to some Lean content! One of the key elements in Lean Manufacturing is to avoid passing defects to the next steps in a production process. Thus, everytime an anomalous situation is detected, the process is stopped until the problem is solved. In the following video we can observe how this procedure is implemented in Toyota factories. Enjoy it!

Time for Insights

• “Stop production so that production never has to stop”. This apparently contradictory sentence is the base of the Jidoka philosophy instaured by Toyota. In japanese, this word is pronounced the same as the word for automation but some of the characters used to write each word are different. Toyota’s Jidoka term is changed so humans are included in the equation: people with the ability to identify problems and to quickly come up with ideas to solve them. You can read more about this here.

• This method encourages workers to speak up when problems are detected and the team leader will be there to help, not to yell at them. It is said that in some Toyota factories the Andon cord is pulled around 5.000 times a day! This is a good example of how Lean must be also a culture so that workers are not afraid to stop production processes to solve problems.

• This principle is also implemented someway in software development methodologies. CI/CD pipelines and alerting systems automatically stop deployments if a test or build process fails, encouraging developers to solve it and avoiding bugs (defects) in a product release.