Almost Standard Work: 6 Pieces, 5 Steps and 3 Mistakes

Several weeks ago I posted an article related to building a pinewood derby car. After superior engineering, cutting edge tribology and a monster paint job, we didn’t bring anything home except the car and hopes of a better race next year. So our next project was at Lowe’s.

Andon Calls and Muri

I’m currently working my way through Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata.  A formal review will follow in the future as I’m approximately half done but I can already say there are many great insights into TPS.  However, one of the insights has sparked up an old fire that I always seem to struggle with understanding [...]

Respect for People – Corrective Actions

We recently came across a situation in a very long cycle time process. During the “automatic” process an operator is to check the status of the operation every 30 minutes and make any corrections for process deviations.   Now that we are focusing on this process, we created a plan to poka yoke the system so that we [...]

Another Interesting Poka Yoke

Last week Bryan posted about a poka yoke (error proofing) that he found when he bought a kitchen table (here.)  Today I received a piece of office furniture and was frustrated when I looked at the instructions (I read instructions when on company time – I only follow my y chromosome driven instinct to disregard [...]