TPS - JIDOKA – DON’T COPY

“American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan—but they
don’t know what to copy! To copy is to invite disaster” – Professor Deming

The first pitfall in trying to copy, is using words that no one understands, rather
than speaking English. Ask one of your employees what the Japanese word Jidoka
means and he’ll probably shrug his shoulders. If he uses Google translate he will
be told it means “Magnetic clay”.

TPS

According to Toyota in Japan, Jidoka is one of two “pillars” of the way they do
stuff. To Toyota, it means "automation with a human touch". Toyota’s web site
says that as soon as any abnormality is detected, production is stopped. The stop
can be either manual or automatic.

There’s nothing new or Japanese about machines that automatically stop

themselves. Your washing machine will stop if it detects vibration. Your PC halts
if it detects overheating. A $160,000 Tesla is recently reported to have locked
itself up after detecting a new $26,000 battery would be nice to have … an all
American idea.

Temperature, vibration, low voltage, thread tension are easy anomalies to detect.
However, there are a myriad of other things that can go wrong that are far more
difficult or costly to identify automatically. For example, the space shuttle had 5
computers doing the same work, in case one or two failed or made an error …
way too expensive for most manufacturing.
MANUAL STOP

Instead, Toyota and most companies rely on people to detect when something is
amiss. Toyota has a pull cord to stop the line. Immediate shut down of a
production line, may be fine for as Toyota. However copying this practice is folly.

For industries, such as steel, aluminium, glass, petrochem, power generation,

“stop the line” is only done in extreme circumstances. Operators cannot at will,
stop blast furnaces, Bessemer furnaces, potlines, glass furnaces, nuclear reactors,
or petrochem plants, because restart is so difficult, costly and/or damaging.

STOP COST

For other industries, “stopping the line” for a fault should be avoided, because of
the time and costs of restart, and the loss of production. For example, I worked in
a wall board plant, where everything possible was done to keep the plant running.
I vividly remember one night when there was screaming from the end of the line
as an operator with a long metal rod smashed board through the forming line.
Men were running everywhere. I ran down as fast as I could. Within a couple of
minutes I found and corrected what I identified as the electrical problem, and
shutdown was avoided.

FINDING the CAUSE

Finding cause(s) of most problems in industry requires the process to be

operating. It’s like finding the cause of a squeak in a car. It’s impossible when the
car is stopped.

SUMMARY
Don’t be a sheep. Don’t stop because Toyota does. Toyota’s production system is
fine for Toyota. Think rather than copying.