Improve Productivity with Poka-Yoke - Poka-yoke techniques prevent detects, promote job safety and prevent damage to machinery

摘要

Legendar manufacturing guru W. Edwaids Doming said. "Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the process." Put another way, it's much more cost-effective to prevent manufacturing defects than to look for them after the fact. This is the basis of the Japanese concept of poka-yoke (pronounced POH-kah YOH-kay), which was introduced in 1961 by Shigeo Shingo, an industrial engineer at Toyota Motor Co. (Toyota City, Japan). Shingo's initial term was actually baka-yoke, which means "fool-proofing." However, in 1963 a worker at what is today Toyota Auto Body Co. (Kariya, Japan) refused to use baka-yoke mechanisms in her work area, because of the term's dishonorable and offensive connotation. Hence, the term was changed to poka-yoke, which means "error-proofing"" or "mistake-proofing."