Jidoka & Autonomation

Lean Manufacturing Series

2009 Factory Strategies Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Outline
What is Jidoka? Why Jidoka? What does Jidoka do? History Prevention Techniques Jidoka Steps
Detect Stop Fix Investigate

2009 Factory Strategies Group LLC. All rights reserved.

What is Jidoka?
Jidoka is providing machines and operators the ability to detect when an abnormal condition has occurred and immediately stop work. This enables operations to build-in quality at each process and to separate men and machines for more efficient work. Jidoka is one of the two pillars of the Toyota Production System along with just-in-time. Jidoka is sometimes called autonomation, meaning automation with human intelligence.

2009 Factory Strategies Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Why Jidoka?
Increase quality Lower costs Improve customer service Reduce lead time

2009 Factory Strategies Group LLC. All rights reserved.

History of Jidoka
In the olden days, back-strap looms, ground looms, and high-warp looms were used to manually weave cloth. In 1896, Sakichi Toyoda invented Japan's first selfpowered loom called the "Toyoda Power Loom." Subsequently, he incorporated numerous revolutionary inventions into his looms, including the weft-breakage automatic stopping device, which automatically stopped the loom when a thread breakage was detected, the warp supply device, and the automatic shuttle changer.
In 1924, Sakichi invented the world's first automatic loom, called the "Type-G Toyoda Automatic Loom (with non-stop shuttlechange motion)" which could change shuttles without stopping operation.
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Prevention Techniques
Poka Yoke
Visual control of quality Prevents defects from happening Example: A floppy disk can only be inserted into the drive in one orientation

Andons
Commonly lights to signal production line status
Red: line stopped Yellow: call for help Green: all normal

Andon signals require immediate attention

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Jidoka Steps
1. The four steps in Jidoka are: 2. Detect the abnormality. 3. Stop. 4. Fix or correct the immediate condition. 5. Investigate the root cause and install a countermeasure.

2009 Factory Strategies Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Detect and Stop

All of the mechanisms of lean manufacturing follow the same pattern.
They are designed to operate with the bare minimum (just enough, just in time) in order to detect abnormal conditions or system changes that might otherwise go unnoticed. Visual controls are just decoration unless they trigger action.

Detecting an abnormal condition does no good, though, unless there is follow-up.

Bringing all production to a grinding halt until the problem is resolved can be difficult.
Depends on the nature of the problem. But stop is frequently simply a mental shift. It means "stop doing what you were doing because you need to do something different." It is an acknowledgement that some kind of intervention is required. That might mean shutting down a process or machine, or it might mean signaling for assistance.

2009 Factory Strategies Group LLC. All rights reserved.