Jidoka 47
After that, I started searching for explanations everywhere, except among external sources, but I found no descriptions of techniques .
A few years later I left Toyota to be a Lean Agent in an auto parts company. It was a brand-new facility, b over Lean concepts and considered by many as a model Lean plant. In truth, I was seduced by their outstanding Lean structure and their amazing, fully detailed Lean manual, The Lean Production System Manual. This handbook had complete, detailed instructions on how to implement a Lean system. All the requirements for a Lean company were listed there. The company also had lots of experts running training sections and developing Lean projects. I had definitely not seen that structure at Toyota. In fact, at that time, I could say that their Lean system was better than Toyota's.
On the other hand, something was intriguing mes despite the fact that the above-mentioned structure had been implemented, the basic con. cepts were not in place! There was a huge distance between what they had written and what they really did. The procedures that were performed at Toyota in a natural way were just neglected.
I started asking myself, if the structure here is so great, then why has Toyota had more success deploying Lean than my new company has ever dreamed of ?
After experiencing failures and successes in deploying Lean techniques in different processes, I learned that the simplicity of Toyota's TPS material was actually its major advantage. The principles embraced by the House of TPS guide workers to drive their efforts to strengthen the system's founda- tion and pillars, without inducing them to apply a specific technique, I had just underestimated the power of that analogy!
We still observe companies that focus their efforts on deploying Lean techniques. Thus, Lean becomes another program for "specialists," and department performances are measured by the number of Lean tech- niques that are implemented .
The bad news about this approach is that when Lean becomes a task for specialists instead of everyone's duty, your Lean deployment process will need direct supervision to achieve the desired quality level. And as we see below, the Jidoka principle is just the opposite: We should decouple the process' quality from direct supervision.
When deploying Jidoka, the Lean expert does not play the auditor's role, but rather the teacher's role--a Sensei who imparts knowledge a shares his experiences. Instead of using books, the Sensei guides his pupils