Establishing the Daicel production system and rolling it out group-wide (2008)

Efficiency, and the craftsman’s memory

At the centre of this decision lies the difficulty peculiar to a process industry. Where the Toyota production system, in assembly and fabrication, lets you follow a process with your eyes, in a chemical plant the reaction proceeds inside a vessel and the running of it has been entrusted to the instinct and experience of skilled operators. What Daicel chose, in the middle of an unusually early wave of retirements, was to write that instinct and experience out into hundreds of thousands of cases and move them onto a single operating screen. It can be read as an attempt to answer a seemingly contradictory demand — cut the number of people while keeping their skill — in a set order: make it visible, then standardize it.

How far tacit knowledge can in fact be moved into explicit form remains, however, an open question. Even with hundreds of thousands of cases loaded onto the screen, the final judgement about an abnormality beyond what was anticipated still rests with a person. In an age when IoT and AI take over the optimization of plant operation, there is no guarantee that a screen which has copied out the craftsman’s skill will not itself become a new kind of tacit knowledge for the generation that follows. Whether the “never stop the plant” philosophy that began at the Aboshi works can be an answer to the succession of skills itself, or merely changes the form that succession takes, is something the shop floor has yet to show.