Lean’s High-Tech Makeover | Technology content from IndustryWeek

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This article from Industry Week suggests that for Toyota to use high technology in Manufacturing is something new or a departure from its traditional system. It presents the Assembly Line Control (ALC) system as something new, when it has been in existence since at least the early 1990s.

We should not forget that even Ohno described jidoka as one of the two pillars of the Toyota Production System, on a par with Just-in-Time, and that jidoka means “automation with a human touch,” or “autonomation.”

The English-language literature often reduces jidoka to making machines stop when they malfunction, but the actual jidoka includes a complete automation strategy, with sequences of steps to automate both fabrication and assembly operations, as well as an approach to managing the interactions between humans and machines on a manufacturing shop floor.

This is what I wrote about in Working with Machines.

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