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Andon (manufacturing)

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Re: Andon (manufacturing)

#21

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #12
collectedparts wrote: post #4

Trader Joe's cashier bells have entered the chat. Ironically, the "request assistance" button and accompanying blinking light on top of your stand at self-checkout are the "self-managing" version of that where you as the customer are partly an employee. oh well

I was at a Safeway last month, and I asked the overseer guy what the lamps meant on top of the self-check machines, and he said he honestly didn’t know.

where I live, they light up when the self check-out needs a member of staff to do an age verification or spot check. Or I suppose when there's an error, but that's not as common.

Re: Andon (manufacturing)

#22

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Ntrails wrote: post #15
weinzierl wrote: post #13

As a kid I used to substitute in an injection molding plant. We worked for four hours, pause, four hours. The plant ran three shifts, 7 days a week. I worked in a big hall with two rows of molding machines. Each one had a pole with a yellow beacon light at the top. The machines had fixed cycle times and the operator had to repeat the same steps every cycle. For example on one machine I had to put four small metal cyl…

> Whenver I think my job is bad I remember that time and I'm glad for what I have. I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline! I think my lowest point was vacuum packing smoked salmon. It wasn't dissimilar in some ways (repeat simple task endlessly), but the real crux was the absolute inability to evade the smell. It came home with you and lingered hard. The grea…

> I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!

One of my first coding jobs, was maintenance programming a 1970s-vintage FORTRAN IV codebase (primitive email system).

Over 100KLoC of slop-quality pasta. Not one single comment. No subroutines, 2-character variable names, etc. The original author was around, but it was worth your job to bother him. I was better off, using a Ouija board, to contact his father.

That informed my approach, for the rest of my life.

Re: Andon (manufacturing)

#23

Post by sarreph »

kesor wrote: post #11
donandon wrote: post #6

Let's rewrite all software to use Andon instead if exception

Start with writing software that has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poka-yoke in mind

That's actually the wikipedia article that inspired me to name a repo-convention checker I made called Pokayoke[0]. Do find it fascinating (as with Andon) how many cool Japanese loan-words there are for process refinement.

[0] - https://pokayoke.codes

Re: Andon (manufacturing)

#24

Post by EvanAnderson »

Ntrails wrote: post #15
weinzierl wrote: post #13

As a kid I used to substitute in an injection molding plant. We worked for four hours, pause, four hours. The plant ran three shifts, 7 days a week. I worked in a big hall with two rows of molding machines. Each one had a pole with a yellow beacon light at the top. The machines had fixed cycle times and the operator had to repeat the same steps every cycle. For example on one machine I had to put four small metal cyl…

> Whenver I think my job is bad I remember that time and I'm glad for what I have. I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline! I think my lowest point was vacuum packing smoked salmon. It wasn't dissimilar in some ways (repeat simple task endlessly), but the real crux was the absolute inability to evade the smell. It came home with you and lingered hard. The grea…

> I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline!

I'll go one further. Not only should everybody have to do a crap job or two, but they should have to work with the public. Imagine how much more chill people would be with service workers having had the experience of being one themselves.

Re: Andon (manufacturing)

#25

Post by jeffrallen »

Ntrails wrote: post #15
weinzierl wrote: post #13

As a kid I used to substitute in an injection molding plant. We worked for four hours, pause, four hours. The plant ran three shifts, 7 days a week. I worked in a big hall with two rows of molding machines. Each one had a pole with a yellow beacon light at the top. The machines had fixed cycle times and the operator had to repeat the same steps every cycle. For example on one machine I had to put four small metal cyl…

> Whenver I think my job is bad I remember that time and I'm glad for what I have. I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline! I think my lowest point was vacuum packing smoked salmon. It wasn't dissimilar in some ways (repeat simple task endlessly), but the real crux was the absolute inability to evade the smell. It came home with you and lingered hard. The grea…

Cheese warehouse: the feta buckets always leaked onto to wooden pallets, making an unholy stink.

My step dad's worst was shoveling iron shot used to grind cement out of the grinder, lifting them up over his head, next to the kiln on an already boiling hot Californian summer day.

Re: Andon (manufacturing)

#26

Post by jeffrallen »

kqr wrote: post #7
smallnix wrote: post #3

In theory a good escalation system. In practice there must be strong guarantees and trust that there are no repercussions for triggering. Otherwise management will tell you over and over to "pull the andon cord / escalate earle & often" but really no one does.

Not only must there be trust, but there must also be a resolve to make deeper fixes to problems surfaced through the andon system. It's a typical mistake to forget that part. If the response to a problem is patching over the immediate symptom, then the cord will keep being pulled for the same reasons so often no work will end up getting done. Then the andon system is abandoned as "didn't work for our organisation". W…

Yeah, at $WORK, the incident doc has a section for corrective actions. And they mostly get done, but having them struggle for priority with regular work is a problem.

Also, it occurs to me that we leaders should do a better job of saying, "look at that excellent job of attacking that corrective item that team just did!" so that it's clear to people that this is not clean-up work, but in fact the most essential kind of tech debt that's actively being paid down, which identified itself as such by causing an outage.

Re: Andon (manufacturing)

#28

Post by jingpostmedia »

jgilias wrote: post #5
smallnix wrote: post #3

In theory a good escalation system. In practice there must be strong guarantees and trust that there are no repercussions for triggering. Otherwise management will tell you over and over to "pull the andon cord / escalate earle & often" but really no one does.

Yes. There was an article somewhere about how in a Japanese factory it gets pulled thousands of times a year, but only 2 in an American one. EDIT: Found it: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-japanese-companies-do-so-many Search for “Ford plant”, second occurrence for that particular bit. The article made rounds on HN a couple months ago.

[flagged]

Re: Andon (manufacturing)

#29

Post by CGMthrowaway »

Ntrails wrote: post #15
weinzierl wrote: post #13

As a kid I used to substitute in an injection molding plant. We worked for four hours, pause, four hours. The plant ran three shifts, 7 days a week. I worked in a big hall with two rows of molding machines. Each one had a pole with a yellow beacon light at the top. The machines had fixed cycle times and the operator had to repeat the same steps every cycle. For example on one machine I had to put four small metal cyl…

> Whenver I think my job is bad I remember that time and I'm glad for what I have. I generally suspect folks would be a lot happier if they'd had a few more crap jobs as a baseline! I think my lowest point was vacuum packing smoked salmon. It wasn't dissimilar in some ways (repeat simple task endlessly), but the real crux was the absolute inability to evade the smell. It came home with you and lingered hard. The grea…

Salmon canning in Alaska was many people's ticket/gateway to that romantic state. If you were a climbing or ski bum or fishing bum type of guy, it was a great but grueling gig that would grant you access to the best outdoors spots in the world.

Salmon canning was also a gateway to getting on board the crab boats (Deadliest Catch boats), which was another dream for many a young man, and where you could make real money (even more grueling) - and have plenty of leisure to boot.

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