Poka-yoke: Improving Product Quality by Preventing Defects - Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun

If your goal is 100 percent zero defects, here is the book for you - a completely illustrated guide to poka-yoke (mistake-proofing) for supervisors and shop-floor workers. The result is better product quality and greater participation by workers in efforts to improve your processes, your products, and your company as a whole. Many poka-yoke ideas come from line workers and are implemented with the help of engineering staff or tooling or machine specialists.

The book: organizes examples according to the broad issue or problem they address; pinpoints how poka-yoke applies to specific devices, parts and products, categories of improvement methods, and processes; provides sample improvement forms for you to sketch out your own ideas; and, use Poka-yoke in study groups as a model for your improvement efforts. The first section of the book uses a simple, illustrated format to summarize many of the concepts and main features of poka-yoke.The second section shows 240 examples of poka-yoke improvements implemented in Japanese plants. It may be your single most important step toward eliminating defects completely.

(For an industrial engineering perspective on how source inspection and poka-yoke can work together to reduce defects to zero, see Shigeo Shingo\'s "Zero Quality Control".)