What is poka-yoke, and how does it benefit you

Poka-yoke, simply put, is a Japanese of ensuring that this or that aspect of your business is error-free. Sounds to good to be true, right? Wrong! Poka-yoke is working for lots of businesses, with increasing effectiveness. Poka-yoke is basically designed so that a system can look at another system, realize exactly how the other system is supposed to be working, and then sort of watch over it and either keep it from making mistakes or worn you if it's about to.
Imagine that you've got a system that creates plastic superheroes that sing and dance and come in different flavors. It's a complicated system. One part of the system handles the molds of the super heroes, another handles their singing abilities, aPoka-yoke, simply put, is a Japanese of ensuring that this or that aspect of your business is error-free. Sounds to good to be true, right? Wrong! Poka-yoke is working for lots of businesses, with increasing effectiveness. Poka-yoke is basically designed so that a system can look at another system, realize exactly how the other system is supposed to be working, and then sort of watch over it and either keep it from making mistakes or worn you if it's about to.
Imagine that you've got a system that creates plastic superheroes that sing and dance and come in different flavors. It's a complicated system. One part of the system handles the molds of the super heroes, another handles their singing abilities, another their dancing abilities, another their unique and delicious flavors. You don't want any part of the system going down, because these little fellows are advertised as singing, dancing, flavorful superheroes, and if a consumer buys one and it's flawed in one or more of these areas, you're going to have an angry consumer on your hands.
nother their dancing abilities, another their unique and delicious flavors. You don't want any part of the system going down, because these little fellows are advertised as singing, dancing, flavorful superheroes, and if a consumer buys one and it's flawed in one or more of these areas, you're going to have an angry consumer on your hands.

But it's difficult, when manufacturing so many of one thing, to keep on eye on every product that spits out of a machine, etc. Not difficult, impossible. The idea of poka-yoke is that it's a machine, too, it can do things that a regular human being can't. It can keep an eye on the entire machine, it can watch over the figure-making part, the song and dance part, the flavor part. If it sense that the machine is starting to produce dung-flavored models, it will either correct this gross mistake or alert you of it. Poka-yoke can sometimes even anticipate a problem, warning you that it's going to happen even before it really does.
Now, poka-yoke sounds complex, and it is. It's complicated technology and it requires the hands of an expert to install it and run it and teach you how to continue to run it. Therefore, you must be as careful as possible in your research. Careful in this sense means that you do as much research as you can, that you don't cut any corners, that you look at every option and read all the relevant materials.
Thanks to the Internet, all you have to do is go to your favorite search engine, type "poka-yoke," and walla!-just about a thousand different articles will spring up at once. You don't, of course, have to read a thousand articles. But you should read the important ones, the ones published by names that you trust.
And then, of course, you're going to have to transfer your knowledge to your team. It may be good to handpick a team meant to dedicate a portion of its time every day to understanding and preparing for the implementation of poka-yoke. That way, when the trainer arrives, you'll be ready. You can have a whole slew of brains, minds, talents, abilities, points of view, and so forth, ready to contribute. Just as an engine is made of various parts which are useless taken apart and powerful and invaluable taken together, your team will either be useless or indespensible.
Consider, for a moment, the implications of something like poka-yoke. Manufacturing is a business where one small error in a system can lead to thousands of dollars in damaged goods, twisted machine parts, and even endanger human lives. Poka-yoke is meant to stop all these bad things from happening. It's not perfect, of course, but the best technological minds in the world are working every day on improving it. It's up to you to keep up on those improvements, find out what they are, stay abreast of things. If you do, and if you successfully implement poka-yoke into your manufacturing business, it could be that you've just taken the most important step in your business career thus far. It's something to think about, anyway, and worth at the very least browsing the Internet for a few moments and seeing what it has to offer.