ANDON

Andon is derived from a Japanese term for a type of paper lantern. In manufacturing it refers to a system to notify management, maintenance, and other workers of a quality or process problem.

It started as a simple way of clear communication where Commonly color-coded is:

• Green: Normal operations.
• Yellow: – changeover or planned maintenance.
• Red: – abnormal, machine down.

Other key principle is you empower the operators giving them the authority to stop the production when a problem occurs.

Nowadays it is an end to end process where:

• the all events are managed and tracked with information to analyze it and enable the supervisors to understand root causes of issues that potentially can be repeatable.
• there is event schedule for understanding the maintenance activities,
• graphical support for operators that are not in the plant,
• emergency communication systems that enable electronic notifications.