Overview of Poka Yoke into Lean Manufacturing

While staying a plant in the early 1960s, Shingo saw that workers were forgetting to supplement springs in a simple on/off switch. This one minor mistake resulted in faulty parts being manufactured and shipped. From his observations, Shingo learned two things: Many times, people forget to do things, and many times people forget that they have forgotten to do things.

Knowing that these minor human errors were the origin cause of the problem, Shingo started working on ways to enhance the procedures and to make it "idiot-proof" (baka-yoke). After a worker protested that the term was insulting, he changed it to poka-yoke, which swings the focus from the worker to the procedure. By restructuring the process so that the operation could not progress until the worker had inserted the spring into the switch, rarer human errors were made and higher quality products were shipped.

How does poka-yoke fit into Lean manufacturing?

The chief purpose of Lean is to remove waste, constantly improve procedures, rise product value, and solve consumers problems all while dropping costs. Lean concepts and tools are usually simple and easy to execute. For any Lean application to be truly successful, must have total buy-in of all employees from the top down. As with the Lean concept of the Theory of Constraints (TOC), poka-yoke knows that there will be confining factors that can slow down manufacturing and result in faulty products. Work is to find the root causes of the constraints.

After finding the root cause, TOC goals to feat the constraint using existing resources to decrease the effect of the constraint. If the constraint is an overworked employee, reorganizing assignments to balance the workload can lead to increased efficiency and higher productivity. Poka-yoke complements TOC by applying procedures or fixes that make it incredible for constraints to happen in the system.

Benefits of Using Poka Yoke:

Applying poka-yoke in organization will benefit organization in several ways:

• Error anticipation (control) and error avoidance (warning) means that spend less time and money to training employees.
• Less errors mean more safety for workers and customers.
• Less time and money are wasted on quality checks and inspection because the system is considered to be mistake-proof.
• Employees accept a culture of constant improvement as a way of life.
• Zero flaws, or as close to zero as possible, decreases waste and costs.
• Higher quality products lead to improved consumers satisfaction and stakeholder confidence.

Using poka-yoke stops or greatly decreases errors and this builds confidence in employees, management, and stakeholders. Increased confidence that comes from getting work done right the first time can result in bigger products, better consumer satisfaction, improved brand loyalty, and increased profits. Poka Yoke training contains more than 350 PPT slides and a trainer’s guide. This Poka Yoke Training PPT is beneficial while conducting corporate training sessions for Poka-Yoke system at several client organizations, including multinational companies. Poka-Yoke is a procedure to avoid unintentional errors in the organization and make mistake-proofing culture in the organization. This method is used to strive towards zero defect work culture by designing devices.