Also called autonomation, stop the line, built-in quality
What is jidoka?
Machines and people stop the moment something goes wrong, instead of carrying on and making a hundred bad parts.
What else it is called
- Other names
- autonomation, stop the line, built-in quality
- In French
- autonomation
Related entries
Understanding jidoka
The idea goes back to Toyoda’s automatic loom, which stopped itself when a thread broke rather than weaving metres of defective cloth. Applied to a plant it means two things. Machines detect their own abnormal conditions and stop. And people are expected to stop the line when they see something wrong, rather than passing the problem downstream.
The second half is the hard one, and it is cultural rather than technical. In a plant where stopping the line is career-limiting, nobody stops it, defects travel, and the problem is found at final inspection when four hundred parts have been made. The plants where this works have made it explicitly safe to stop, and they treat each stop as a problem to solve rather than an incident to explain.
In practice
Count how many times the line was stopped by an operator last month. A number near zero does not mean nothing went wrong.
Frequently asked
Is jidoka the same as automation?
No. Ordinary automation runs the process without a person. Jidoka gives the machine the judgement to know when something is wrong and stop, which is what allows one person to look after several machines safely.