The differences between the North American and the Japanese schools of management and production have been studied for decades now. These differences were exacerbated when Toyota started to gain market share from its North American competitor, Ford, in the automotive mass-market.

Between discussions on Ford’s Fordism and Toyota’s Just-in-time production theories, Shigeo Shingo, a Japanese industrial engineer, introduced the concept of Poka-Yoke into the Toyota production system in the 1960s. The term comes from the Japanese words, Yokeru – “to prevent”, and Poka – “inadvertent errors” and means “mistake-proofing”.

This approach was initially implemented exclusively in production processes to help equipment operators prevent mistakes by drawing attention to and correcting errors as they occurred1 Later it was thought to be useful in other areas of an organization’s operations and management as well as in fuel management.

So, if your organization depends on a fleet or equipment to run its operations and you are not an oil sheik, you probably want to know what is going on with your fuel. Just as errors can cause significant losses in any production process, a sub-optimal fuel management system may too.

Besides eliminating the risk of misuse of this important resource, the idea of “Poka-Yoking” a fuel management system is to prevent human errors when manually logging information of fuel usage into a system. By automating this process, organizations have access to accurate and real-time data – and therefore, streamline the process of tracking their fuel.

Through systems such as the Fleet series and the state-of-the-art Simcom, Computrol allows organizations to Poka-Yoke their fuel management, giving them the peace of mind that is deserved.

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For more information, visit computrolsystems.com, call +1 604.421.1001 or drop us a line at info@computrolsystems.com.

References:

1.   (2018). Sixsigmadaily.com. Retrieved 6 September 2018, from https://www.sixsigmadaily.com/poka-yoke/