Tag: mistake proofing

Management Books

How do you know when do to an A3, and when to just solve the problem by Tracey Richardson
"If there was a defect that got past an area/department and to the customer, this is unacceptable and should be counter-measured temporary (stop the bleeding) to ensure nothing else 'flows out' as well as finding the permanent countermeasure (using PDCA) (again this is all initiated by the plant manager--they should be responsible at this level and gather the resources necessary, and involving their people to ensure this will not happen again and learn from it for the the next A3)."

Practical Combinatorial Testing by Raghu Kacker, Rick Kuhn, Yu Lei
"Combinatorial methods can help reduce the cost and increase the effectiveness of software testing for many applications. ... With the NASA application, for example, 67% of the failures were triggered by only a single parameter value, 93% by 2-way combinations, and 98% by 3-way combinations. The detection rate curves for the other applications studied are similar, reaching 100% detection with 4 to 6 way interactions."

Why Create Poka-yokes, and Why Disconnect Them? by Michael Ballé
"Lines with overly complex Poka-Yoke devices tend to lose much productivity by having operators simply run the part through the detection device again until a part would be consistently stopped. Not surprisingly, production management can be tempted to simply disconnect the poka- yoke in order to run the line."

Each necessary, but only jointly sufficient by John Allspaw
"for complex systems: there is no root cause. ... Frankly, I think that this tendency to look for singular root causes also comes from how deeply entrenched modern science and engineering is with the tenets of reductionism. So I blame Newton and Descartes. ... In the same way that you shouldn’t ever have root cause 'human error', if you only have a single root cause, you haven’t dug deep enough."

Maximize Test Coverage Efficiency And Minimize the Number of Tests Needed by John Hunter
"The steeper the slope the more efficient your test plan is. If you repeat the same tests of pairs and triples and… while not taking advantage of the chance to test, untested pairs and triples you will have to create and run far more test than if you intelligently create a test plan. With many interactions to test it is far too complex to manually derive an intelligent test plan. A

Training Within Industry
Blog on standardization, process improvement, training and lean manufacturing topics.

Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections by John Hunter
The aim of Curious Cat Management Improvement Connections is to contribute to the successful adoption of management improvement to advance joy in work and joy in life. The site provides connections to resources on a wide variety of management topics to help managers improve the performance of their organization. The site was started in 1996 by John Hunter.