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Autonomation: What Is It?

Autonomation or Jidoka is combining the efforts of person and machine to stop a process when a defect is detected.  In other words, it is Automation with a human touch.

By stopping a process as soon as a defect is discovered, team-mates are better able to discover the cause of a problem, close to the source.  In fact the steps associated with implementing Autonomation in a workplace are often:

1.  Defect is detected
2.  Stop and notify
3.  Fix the immediate condition
4.  Investigate the root cause and install a countermeasure

Jidoka is most often used with an Andon – a signal that is triggered when things are not running as they should, however it can also be built in to a process where work automatically stops if something is wrong.

The most famous example of this is the original work of Sakichi Toyoda in the early 1900s, where he invented an automatic “stop” if a thread broke on his looms, helping people to avoid wasting an entire piece of work for just one broker thread.

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