In theory a good escalation system. In practice there must be strong guarantees and trust that there are no repercussions for triggering. Otherwise management will tell you over and over to "pull the andon cord / escalate earle & often" but really no one does.
Not only must there be trust, but there must also be a resolve to make deeper fixes to problems surfaced through the andon system. It's a typical mistake to forget that part. If the response to a problem is patching over the immediate symptom, then the cord will keep being pulled for the same reasons so often no work will end up getting done.
Then the andon system is abandoned as "didn't work for our organisation".
Workers should pull the andon cord (and thus stop the entire production line!) when they need to go to the bathroom, for example. The solution is not to sternly tell the worker to hold it for longer, nor to have a replacement worker come over, but to review scheduling and include more appropriate bathroom breaks between shifts at the line. (Or, if the problem affects one worker disproportionately, figure out some alternative way for that worker to contribute.)
Maybe it works for small stuff like running out of bolts in a production line but not something high level like the owner is an idiot and made a massive mistake. I sometimes think about the high profile Amazon Fire Phone and why nobody involved in building the Amazon fire phone say at any point that this thing was destined to fail. I'm sure Amazon dot com had highly intelligent workers and managers who saw what was coming but never spoke up.
I have never ever heard from any Amazon employee I've met in person tell me of any instance where they told their manager or supervisor something and had the superior "disagree and commit". It always goes in one direction, down unlike what they say in their HR material.
I don't think this is a solved problem at all, short of making it very inexpensive to pull that proverbial cord as a worker AND making it very expensive to ignore such cord pulling as management. I don't know if it is possible to have that with our management system today. These two properties — cheap to pull and expensive to ignore — are intertwined. It means management giving up a lot, perhaps almost all, of its power to the workers. If you follow through with this, you also need to share more information because if the workers are actually empowered to decide, they should have the information necessary to make such decisions.
It requires someone with power to consistently and deliberately eschew this power which isn't sustainable because at some point in the management chain you will come across someone who will not.
Even at Toyota, I don't think you can pull the Andon cord on hydrogen fuel cell to switch to electric vehicles because at this point you are not just up against management, you are up against national energy policy.
One interesting thing you learn over the years is there's a million ways to improve process, and a million ways to avoid it. Virtually every improvement is unlikely; either it's difficult to understand, or difficult to get approval/consensus for, or difficult to implement. If it was easy you'd have done it already. Process won't improve until a motivation arrives that pushes past the difficulties.
Trader Joe's cashier bells have entered the chat.
Ironically, the "request assistance" button and accompanying blinking light on top of your stand at self-checkout are the "self-managing" version of that where you as the customer are partly an employee. oh well
In theory a good escalation system. In practice there must be strong guarantees and trust that there are no repercussions for triggering. Otherwise management will tell you over and over to "pull the andon cord / escalate earle & often" but really no one does.
Yes. There was an article somewhere about how in a Japanese factory it gets pulled thousands of times a year, but only 2 in an American one.
EDIT: Found it: https://davidoks.blog/p/why-japanese-companies-do-so-many
Search for “Ford plant”, second occurrence for that particular bit. The article made rounds on HN a couple months ago.
Not only must there be trust, but there must also be a resolve to make deeper fixes to problems surfaced through the andon system. It's a typical mistake to forget that part. If the response to a problem is patching over the immediate symptom, then the cord will keep being pulled for the same reasons so often no work will end up getting done.
Then the andon system is abandoned as "didn't work for our organisation".
Workers should pull the andon cord (and thus stop the entire production line!) when they need to go to the bathroom, for example. The solution is not to sternly tell the worker to hold it for longer, nor to have a replacement worker come over, but to review scheduling and include more appropriate bathroom breaks between shifts at the line. (Or, if the problem affects one worker disproportionately, figure out some alternative way for that worker to contribute.)
Maybe it works for small stuff like running out of bolts in a production line but not something high level like the owner is an idiot and made a massive mistake. I sometimes think about the high profile Amazon Fire Phone and why nobody involved in building the Amazon fire phone say at any point that this thing was destined to fail. I'm sure Amazon dot com had highly intelligent workers and managers who saw what was coming but never spoke up.
I have never ever heard from any Amazon employee I've met in person tell me of any instance where they told their manager or supervisor something and had the superior "disagree and commit". It always goes in one direction, down unlike what they say in their HR material.
I don't think this is a solved problem at all, short of making it very inexpensive to pull that proverbial cord as a worker AND making it very expensive to ignore such cord pulling as management. I don't know if it is possible to have that with our management system today. These two properties — cheap to pull and expensive to ignore — are intertwined. It means management giving up a lot, perhaps almost all, of its power to the workers. If you follow through with this, you also need to share more information because if the workers are actually empowered to decide, they should have the information necessary to make such decisions.
It requires someone with power to consistently and deliberately eschew this power which isn't sustainable because at some point in the management chain you will come across someone who will not.
Even at Toyota, I don't think you can pull the Andon cord on hydrogen fuel cell to switch to electric vehicles because at this point you are not just up against management, you are up against national energy policy.
Let's rewrite all software to use Andon instead if exception
One interesting thing you learn over the years is there's a million ways to improve process, and a million ways to avoid it. Virtually every improvement is unlikely; either it's difficult to understand, or difficult to get approval/consensus for, or difficult to implement. If it was easy you'd have done it already. Process won't improve until a motivation arrives that pushes past the difficulties.
Trader Joe's cashier bells have entered the chat. Ironically, the "request assistance" button and accompanying blinking light on top of your stand at self-checkout are the "self-managing" version of that where you as the customer are partly an employee. oh well