Jidoka - an old Toyota practice makes an guest appearance
June 4, 2016
When I started to learn about lean I naturally heard a lot of Toyota stories - it’s pretty inevitable since the whole thinking comes from there. One thing that I learned about was translated as autonomation. I was pretty sure it was a mistranslation.
But the other week when one of my team members said:
What’s the big deal of many things going on? If I’m blocked on a few items I can equally well just start a few more.
(Not his exact words but still those lines of reasoning)
At that point I saw the time to implement some jidoka (as automation is called in Japanese) in our project
What is this “jidoka”-thing really?
Ok, there’s an excellent article about autonomation on Wikipedia so I’ll just summaries it here. The jidoka concept is at the heart of continuous improvements at the Toyota.
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