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Andon (manufacturing)

73 points by tony

by weinzierl

3 subcomments

by smallnix

3 subcomments

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.

by bob1029

1 subcomments

Semiconductor manufacturing takes this to the next level with techniques like statistical process control. Units of capacity or work can take themselves offline automatically if something falls too far out of range. Waiting for a human operator is not really feasible when the facility is mostly automated and the feature sizes are atomic scale. There are also concerns with wafers that must be processed at their next step promptly or they will become guaranteed scrap. Human judgement is too slow to sort all of this out on the inner loop.
The ability for one person to stop the entire factory on purpose is not desirable in these facilities. At least not without a quick meeting first. There isn't an actual "stop line" button anywhere. Investors and customers like Apple and Nvidia would never permit this. The best someone could do (without using a fire axe in the datacenter) is to manually whack the EMO button on all the tools in a certain area (e.g. photo) which would effectively stop the line. By the time the 2nd photo tool goes offline, half of manufacturing leads would have their pagers beeping and security would be well on their way. You could try doing this through the information systems, but they likely didn't grant you permissions to flip status flags on 400 million dollar EUV tools at your leisure.

by tdeck

0 subcomment

I first heard about the Andon cord in this excellent This American Life episode about a GM factory that tried to learn and copy the Toyota method of production. It's still worth a listen and explains the concept well.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

by donandon

1 subcomments

0 subcomment

by 0xbadcafebee

0 subcomment

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.

by collectedparts

1 subcomments

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

by esafak

0 subcomment

by bossyTeacher

0 subcomment

by Qjoe

0 subcomment