poke yoke

a Japanese term meaning ‘to make fail-safe’. Any mechanism or process that prevents mistakes being made can be called a poke yoke. They are techniques and thinking designed to prevent errors in manufacture and service provision. The 3 pin plug is a simple poke yoke, it can only be inserted into the socket in one way, hence – fail-safe. Poke yokes have two broad functions, regulatory and setting. Regulatory devices are those that either control a process or give a warning about it. Control devices are used to shut a process down whenever it detects an abnormality. See PRODUCTION CONTROL.

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References in periodicals archive

* Poke yoke the assembly process to ensure product can only be assembled one way.

Designing for Lean Production: Ten steps for achieving good design for excellence

These, like TPM/5S, are inherently related to poke yoke. In the past, a lot of companies used job certification books or how-to sheets for a job, but these were often a long dissertation on how to do a job.

Lean manufacturing in the mill room--improve efficiencies, decrease costs and improve quality

Part of the Toyota production system is generically known as 'poke yoke' and its objective is to prevent errors.

Manufacturing: Toyota members stop at nothing for build quality; New employees at the Toyota car production plant at Burnaston, near Derby, are surprised and unnerved when they are told one of their responsibilities is to stop the production line. The plant's recently appointed quality director Carl Klemm tells James O'Brien what is behind this revolutionary approach

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