Rowers, Passengers, and Swimmers

You’ll find three groups of respondents for most concepts

I was asked about 15 years ago to give a short presentation about poka-yoke to an association of engineering professors from different U.S. universities. I brought with me several devices that employees from my plant had developed, and I began to tell the story: The technique is not so difficult, but creating an environment in which employees are comfortable surfacing these opportunities is challenging. Poka-yoke, the invention of Shigeo Shingo, is one of my favorite tools because more than any other it taps employee creativity and problem-solving talent.

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rowers, passengers, & swimmers

I ran into the same situation in a different way. You have a really experienced operator and a relatively new operator. You also have a new machine and an older one that needs lots of babysitting. Who runs the newer machine? Traditionally, you'd put the experienced operator with the older machine because they could get better repeatability and thus a higher yield. But the better yield would be on the older machine and the newer would be less efficient than it could be with the newer operator. If, instead, you assigned the new machine to the experienced operator, they could conceivably set it up to run with less attention, allowing them to help the newer operator on the older machine. Now you have 1-1/2 to 2 operators babysitting the older machine (improving the yield) while still having the highest possible yield on the newer machine. Didn't always work in every situation but it was an interesting development.