#Heijunka, Jidoka, Andon, SQDC and skiing

Dear #CEO – Tales from the #boardroom
What does #heijunka , #Jidoka and #andon have in common with #SQDC and #skiing !
For me Heijunka is a method to improve the tango between sales, aka #takt time and #productionplanning aka #cycletime#teams .
It reduces unevenness aka #mura in a production process and minimizing the chance of overburden (machines & people) aka #muri, thereby improving your delivery times hence the D in SQDC. D being a client expectation. If you don’t fix your Mura, which has a major impact on muri you will have large doses of #muda at the operational end.
So #sales team be aware of your decisions on what they impact.

Now all this is fine if you have raw material and components arriving on time, if you don’t then you have to practice Proactive Parts Planning – PPP, that is for another post.
Jidoka, on the other hand,  means a process stops automatically if there are any irregularities. I know I am shorting the description here but for me Jidoka has a major impact on quality. I like to think the Jidoka -machine and Andon – man work together on quality for D, yet another client expectation!.
Andon for me is not so much the little coloured light that goes on above a machine but something much more profound, rooted in #human#psychology and building a #lean blameless #culture at work !.
Wow, heavy. Well Andon is a signal, escalated by the operator to send a signal to the supervisor, that there is a potential issue (hence proactive thinking) or a problem (reactive response) that there is a problem on process which affects quality and can impact cycle time. Again you see how Andon impacts Q and D !.

There is far more to Andon as a culture of people speaking up when they cannot finish a report, or have an idea, they stop the the training, the meeting, whatever. It says, hey, I don’t understand, or I’m gone be late with my report. It can also relate to safety.

All the above will impact your bottom line so C – Cost. There you go SQDC is a Process and People framework.
Not only the order S, then, Q, then D, then C is important but how you approach the issue, so Policy before Expediency. See previous posts on this.
You can import all the lean tools you need, but with no Andon you have a poor operating business.
Skiing !, well, the slopes have to be even so as not to overburden my knees, which will have an effect on my quality experience. I always treat safety first on the slopes. The cost of breaking a leg is too high!. So you see how skiing comes into it !!!

Did you enjoy my post, please like, comment.  

Please dont forget to show your #humanity and make a contribution to the #waterforsouthsudan project, we need to build a water well with your contributions.
Note bene please refer to other authors for a full description of the above concepts.