From the course: Lean Foundations

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Lean quality

Lean quality

- Henry Ford once said that "quality means doing it right "when no one is looking." I can't think of a better description for the lean concept of Jidoka. Jidoka means automation with a human touch and it is a pillar of the Toyota production system. As the definition suggests, the concept covers both the machine aspect and the human aspect of quality. The premise is that when an abnormal situation occurs, work immediately stops. Let's talk about the machine aspect of Jidoka first. Jidoka goes back to the early 1900s. Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of the Toyota Group, invented a textile loom that would automatically stop when a thread broke. A loom is a machine that weaves thread into material to make clothing, a key part of a textile factory. Previously, when a thread broke, the machine kept running until an operator intervene. Any material produced up to that point was defective, so each machine required a very attentive…

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