Lean Sigma and Transportation

The following is from Alan Kandel, writer and retired engineer who now focuses his attention to air quality in California and the impact transportation contributes to it.  Though short, his ideas provide insight for further studies and research.  


Story About Process

My past posts covered subjects like the Hidden Factory, Standard Operating Procedures and the "what, hows and the whys."  Most recently, I read a book by Clayton Christensen, who introduced the concept of Jobs To Be Done or JBTB. If you have time, pick it up; I highly recommend it.  It's titled Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice.

In one YouTube video where he spoke in front of an audience in Oxford, the person who introduced him indicated that his book was one of the top six management books of all time. After reading it I couldn't agree more.

Poka Yoke or Mistake Proofing

I've had conversations about the term “mistake proofing,” a Lean Six Sigma term taken from Toyota's Production Systems “poka yoke,” which means to set up a work environment where mistakes are virtually impossible.  The definition: Mistake proofing, or its Japanese equivalent poka-yoke (pronounced PO-ka yo-KAY), is the use of any automatic device or method that either makes it impossible for an error to occur or makes the error immediately obvious once it has occurred. (Source:  http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/process-analysis-tools/overview/mistake-proofing.html  American Society for Quality or ASQ) Metaphorically speaking, the idea is if you poke an egg yoke while frying, it would prevent the mistake of it being under cooked, though some of us like it that way.