Maintenance can be a major effort at a company, and maintenance costs can chew up a lot of dollars.

And I’m probably telling you nothing new when I say that when maintenance isn’t done, and something breaks, the cost of downtime can be even more significant.

One way to spend less on maintenance in general, and to lose less on maintenance-related downtime, is to practice a preventive maintenance approach.

In this article, we offer a Q&A on some basic topics related to maintenance and preventive maintenance.

Before you begin, you might want to check this short sample from our online Equipment Maintenance and Reliability training course.

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Quality control experts lean heavily on the so-called “7 Basic Tools of Quality” to fine-tune processes as part of an overall quality assurance effort.

It’s said that these basic quality assurance tools were first emphasized by Karou Ishikawa, a Japanese organizational theorist who’s credited as a heavyweight in quality management and is especially known for the development of the quality circle and Ishikawa, or fishbone, diagram, which is itself one of the 7 basic tools we’ll talk about in this article. As is often the cause in quality, you can also detect the influence of W. Edwards Deming on the 7 basic tools.

The 7 tools are graphing techniques that are very helpful for, and commonly used, for quality control troubleshooting purposes.

So let’s start learning about these very useful techniques for quality control.

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The Training Within Industry Job Method program provides a method for making more products, of the same or higher quality, in less time and/or with fewer resources. As author Donald Dinero puts it: “TWI (and Job Methods) helps organizations make the best use of available resources to produce GREATER QUANTITIES of QUALITY PRODUCTS in LESS TIME. What is less obvious is that it does so by leading employees to critical thinking, i.e., by developing a learning organization.”

Interested?

Let’s take a step back before we begin.

Training Within Industry, or TWI, was an American job training program that originated around the time of World War II (and has deeper roots in American job training programs back to World War I). It’s also at the roots of what’s now known as Lean Manufacturing. Training Within Industry had four programs: Job Instruction (JI), Job Methods (JM), Job Relations (JR), and Program Development. Job Instruction, Job Methods, and Job Relations are commonly referred to as the J programs.

This article is one in a series of articles we’ve written looking at Training Within Industry. Previous articles provided an overview of TWI and explained the TWI Job Instruction (JI) program. In this article, we’ll focus on the Job Method (JM) program. We find the Job Method program especially exciting because it’s a great way to empower workers and their supervisors to be creative and innovative at work. These are skills that are increasingly important in the modern workplace and will be even more so in the workplace in the future (dominated by advanced manufacturing, Industry 4.0, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, etc.). So while the TWI Job Method program began in the past, we think it has a lot of value for manufacturing in the present and future.

Before we begin, you may want to know we also have an article that essentially introduces lean manufacturing (What Is Lean? Introducing Employees to Lean Manufacturing). And in particular, the Job Method program has a lot of similarity to Lean’s concept of kaizen for empowering employees to reduce waste, increase value, and improve efficiency, so you may also be interested in our articles What Is Kaizen? and What Is a Kaizen Event?

Finally, in a bit of a coincidence, a lot of the spirit that underlies the Job Methods program and Lean’s concept of kaizen is also covered in our recent article on Motivating Workers to Innovate (And How Your Management Techniques May Be Stifling Innovation), which is based on the book Drive by Daniel Pink. So you may want to add that to the old reading list as well.

And with that said, let’s dive into our introduction to the Training Within Industry Job Method program.

(Credit where credit is due: This article and all articles in our TWI series are largely based on the EXCELLENT Shingo prize winning book Training Within Industry: The Foundation of Lean by Donald A. Dinero. As the saying goes, run don’t want to a bookstore near you to buy a copy and read the whole thing for yourself.)

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