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One can learn a lot about Poka Yoke and Human Errors. This is a story about what a coffee cup taught me about how poor design in our products and systems invite human error.

Ideally, poka-yoke ensures that proper conditions exist before actually executing a process step, preventing defects from occurring in the first place. Where this is not possible, poka-yoke performs a detective function, eliminating defects in the process as early as possible. This can be achieved by following the 6 principles or methods of mistake proofing. These are listed in order of priority in fundamentally addressing mistakes:

We know that a Poka-Yoke approach is a much more effective approach to preventing mistakes and errors. But, sometimes, we see the approach of providing a "do not" sign only, which by itself, is not effective. But, coupled with a process or system that prevents the human from making mistakes or the error from being made, then that's a great balance to warning the person as well as preventing the person from making the mistake in the first place.

"The general answer to this question from today's webinar is that if people don't find a particular tool purposeful, they don't use it. More specifically for poka-yoke, there are seven reasons team members do not see the tool as purposeful:

I look forward to the day when our company implements Poka-yoke on our paper supplies. It works if you believe in it.

Another great Fastcap video!

Have you  ever been yelled at by your spouse or significant other for keeping the toilet lid up? Did you ever wish that there was a device that prevented you from making a mistake such as not placing the toilet lid down?

Putting people and tools on the line to catch defects created by another process is a sign of not showing respect in the inherent capability of the people to do good work. Instead, management has to spend time and energy in creating processes that are capable and can catch errors and mistakes by themselves leading to continuous improvement. Dr. Shigeo Shingo preached these concepts when he talked about zero quality control. According to Dr. Shingo, we cannot achieve the aim of zero defects until we make each element of the process capable to produce perfect quality by ensuring the errors and mistakes are quickly identified and corrected before they lead to defects. His idea of poka-yoke and source checking are exactly in line with this principle.

How could we avoid this from happening with our cross check process?

Let's set it as a vision and then design in 6-8 month improvement targets. The vision can be a year or two out and we can steadily march toward the vision with incremental targets.