Digital Jidoka - Accelerating Total Quality

Quality Planning

JIT is fairly implemented in manufacturing companies with primary focus on implementation of lean tools. But there is greater need to understand and apply the concept of Jidoka especially in today’s digitally disruptive world.

In spite of designing robust processes to build high quality products, variability is inevitable in any system, leading to frequent non conformances in normal production and customer usage. Customer non conformances can be serious threat to manufacturer’s reputation especially as more technology gets introduced in products. 

Most world class organizations follow a structured process to develop and manufacture new products to meet customer requirements such as APQP. During various prototype builds, pilot runs, non-conformances are detected, problems analyzed and root causes corrected so the defects do not happen post launch. A well-executed product quality planning process results in low COPQ. This is possible only with intense organizational discipline and depth in which product realization tools are effectively used. 

PFMEA is a very powerful tool at organizational disposal but often not done in right spirit and with due diligence. It is still a widely used practice in control plan to specify “Contact supervisor” or “Quarantine part” etc. Setting aside parts as non conforming and continuing production indicates management priority of quantity over quality.  This short sightedness is reason why cost of quality remains high for a long time. In fact, this is a likely reason why quality metrics and “Top 5” tend to stagnate quickly in an organization. Monthly KPI charts displayed on shop floor do not seem to excite people to act swiftly on making improvements.

NextGen Manufacturing – Human Capability Building

As we transition away from mass production to personalized products with much shorter life cycles, there is indeed greater necessity to be able design processes with highest levels of performance measures at launch and also sustain them over long term in production and customer use. This simply means PDCA loops in product development and operations need to be rapidly iterative to accelerate continuous improvement. Process problems surface as failure modes at any stage of this cycle from product development through operations and into service. People at all levels in the company must be capable to recognize problems, determine root causes, put countermeasures in place and last but not least verify their effectiveness. All hands should be on the deck in this endeavor as there is strong interactions between complexities of problems at different organizational levels.

Technology should be designed to enable transparent visibility of failure modes, their resolution and effectiveness related to various elements of costs of poor quality in an integrated manner.People in the supply chain – from shop floor to supporting staff should be empowered with real time communication of problems, problem solving techniques, high quality knowledge sharing to prevent failures and also for fast troubleshooting of failures. For example, given a failure mode, actionable information can be given that is role based, intuitive and solves the problem quickly on hand. With the impending advent of cyber physical systems, collaborative interface system will be required to solve complex problems that best synergizes unique abilities of knowledge workers and advanced machine automation.

Organizations that truly believe in relentless pursuit of perfection (minimizing non conformances at any stage) need to sharpen spot light on systematic and rapid problem solving through intelligent convergence of technology and tacit knowledge of people.With this approach, young talent will be attracted to manufacturing industry and consider it as a prospective career option.  It will deliver exceptional organizational performance and also raise human performance.