““By design, flow systems have an everything-works-or-nothing-works quality which must be respected and anticipated. This means that the production team must be cross-skilled in every task (in case someone is absent or needed for another task) and that the machinery must be made 100 percent available and accurate through a series of techniques called Total Productive Maintenance (TPM). It also means that work must be rigorously standardized (by the work team, not by some remote industrial engineering group) and that employees and machines must be taught to monitor their own work through a series of techniques commonly called poka-yoke, or mistake-proofing, which make it impossible for even one defective part to be sent ahead to the next step.7””
