I first heard about the Andon cord in this excellent This American Life episode about a GM factory that tried to learn and copy the Toyota method of production. It's still worth a listen and explains the concept well.
Andon (manufacturing)
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Re: Andon (manufacturing)
#32Semiconductor manufacturing takes this to the next level with techniques like statistical process control. Units of capacity or work can take themselves offline automatically if something falls too far out of range. Waiting for a human operator is not really feasible when the facility is mostly automated and the feature sizes are atomic scale. There are also concerns with wafers that must be processed at their next s…
Self-stopping is called autonomation (or jidoka) in lean/Toyota terms. It's born out of the realisation that automation is capable of producing mistakes at a very high rate, so anything automated needs a way to detect when it's operating outside of the narrow envelope for which it is designed, and shut itself down.
Re: Andon (manufacturing)
#33As 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…
> Foreman had to keep a quota.
I have worked on production lines and I’ve worked in the manufacturing and quality engineering side of things.
I know a lot of companies do have that old school production at all cost approach, but the better places I’ve worked at have put quality metrics ahead of productivity metrics.
Usually the metrics are safety, quality, delivery, and cost in that priority.
I know Goodhart’s law, “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure,” gets quoted a bunch on HN, but then nothing else is offered up. In my opinion, having these additional metrics with their own targets serves to balance out and constrain a single metric screwing things up. For example, if productivity is going up by producing lower quality parts, this will be shown in either the quality metrics (e.g., scrap rate, yield) or the cost metrics (e.g., material costs have increased, rework costs have increased).
The other component of it all is that the operators can only produce to the level of the systems they have. They can make some small, point improvements to help, but generally there need to be larger process or system level changes supported to make significant improvements.
Re: Andon (manufacturing)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Yep. * Unloading fish on a wharf during a violent snowstorm, at night. * Doing the stop/go signs on roadworks for 12 hours in the rain. * Carrying heavy boxes of government records up 5 flights of stairs from a basement for eight hours, and the next day, carrying them up 2 flights of stairs to their new home - blew out the medial meniscus in my right knee doing that * Carrying what Americans call drywall, but like th…
Each sounds like a process that could have been improved if andon had been implemented.
Re: Andon (manufacturing)
#35As 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…
Interesting manufacturing story that does sound pretty crappy.
To bring it across to Andon and Lean, Deming literally addressed this as one of his 14 points of quality management that Lean manufacturing follows:
Point 11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
What’s important here is not that there are buttons in a factory but rather the culture that goes along with their usage.
Point 8. Drive out fear, seems relevant here also.
Sorry you experienced this.