My topic this week is “Jidoka”, which refers to the practice of designing a process to make defects visible. Ideally, the process stops when a defect occurs so that a person can evaluate what the problem is and decide what to do about it.

My first blog post on this topic was Monday and–believe it or not–I discovered a flaw in the process I use to write and publish posts! The defect is that I failed to assign a “category” code to my newly-written post. Because of this, the resulting “defective” post did not appear on my website page. It DID go out via email to those of you who are signed up to be on my “Juicy Quote Plus” list.

I decided that I would try to follow the proper “Lean” problem-solving procedure and walk through it with you.

One of the first steps when a defect is discovered is to see how wide-spread the problem is. I did a quick check and discovered two other posts from the past few months which did not have the correct “category” code. I quickly corrected this.

The next step is to “go to Gemba” to understand the process and investigate how the defect occurred. I’ll share more about that tomorrow.