Prevention – pulling the Andon Cord
The Andon Cord holds a special place in Lean thinking. As part of the Toyota Production System, if you suspected a problem with a car on the assembly line, you would pull the cord that ran around on the assembly line, and it would stop the line. People would come to the spot where the Andon Cord was pulled to see the defect and determine, first, how to fix the defect, and second, what steps would be needed to prevent the defect from occurring in the future.
Taiichi Ohno, the creator of the Toyota Production System, uses the Andon Cord to practice jidoka, empowering anyone to stop work to examine and implement continuous improvement.
For site reliability engineers, the following ideas and principles are used as a way of implementing the Andon Cord and ensuring continuous improvement:
- Planning for risk tolerance by looking at service-level indicators (SLIs), service-level objectives (SLOs), and error budgets
- Enforcing release...
