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

[tweetmeme source=”leanisgood” service=”ow.ly” only_single=false]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.

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Andon Calls and Muri

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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 as I have never been employed by Toyota.

Mike talks about how a Toyota assembly plant was staffed to handle about 1,000 andon calls per shift and they became very concerned when the calls dropped to 700 per shift.  Toyota found that this could only mean two things: 

Respect for People – Corrective Actions

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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 don’t have to rely on an operator remembering to check every half hour,

Another Interesting Poka Yoke

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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 instruction until after I have screwed something up on my time.)  The instructions showed that the back of the chair should be attached to the seat of the chair with a socket head cap screw, a flat washer, and a lock washer.  What was not clear was what went where?