How Industrial Andons Was Built — and What We Learned Watching Customers Use It

Most manual production areas are black holes. Nothing comes out until the end of the shift, when the numbers finally tell you what happened hours ago. By then, the moment to act has long passed.

That problem shaped everything we built.

Where it started

Early in my career, I had the opportunity to work alongside Yoshi Natsume for about six months. Yoshi had been head of Quality Engineering for Toyota North America and had been hired by Taiichi Ohno himself — the architect of the Toyota Production System. His response to almost any situation, good or bad, was the same: (grunt) if you know the process, you can do anything.

That philosophy stayed with me. But later, doing consulting work, I hit my own blind spots. Lean principles are powerful, but applying them to a startup, to product engineering, to supply chain development, to regulated industries — that's a different problem. I didn't have all the answers.

So when the idea for a wireless andon system came to me, I decided to put my money where my mouth was.

2003. A customer insisted on a photo with the new system. That same system is still running today.

The infrastructure gap most manufacturers face

Toyota's andon system works because of the PLC-driven conveyance system running throughout their plants. That infrastructure makes it possible to stop the line immediately or at the end of a pitch. The majority of manufacturers — including Toyota's own OEM suppliers — don't have that infrastructure. A traditional andon system simply isn't an option for them.

I saw this firsthand over 25 years ago, working with a major automotive supplier to Toyota, Ford, and Honda. That experience led directly to the original Industrial Andons system: pure hardware, wireless, modeled after Toyota's approach but designed to be installed quickly in any facility and moved easily as needs changed.

We still have a customer running one of those original systems 25 years later.

What we learned watching customers

After installations, I'd often just stand on the floor and watch. In smaller facilities, team leads and managers wear more hats than their Toyota counterparts. They're not stationed at the line. They didn't always hear the andon go off in time.

I also noticed that andon light states closely matched the indicator lights on machine centers. Our system was already converting physical andon signals into digital ones. That observation led us to develop SFV — Shop Floor View.

SFV is our web-based information hub. Every andon signal hits the system the moment it's triggered. Andon boards update instantly. Email and text notifications go out. Escalation timers start. Everything is recorded.

The result: any size facility gets a layer of real-time visibility that simply wasn't available to them before. Manual operation areas that used to be black holes are now seen as they happen.

Where it's going

We have customers who have been running SFV continuously for over 15 years. I'm now watching them begin to apply AI tools to that data — analyzing trends to focus kaizen events, updating preventive maintenance schedules, driving quality improvement.

They built a rich data layer over years of operation, often without thinking of it that way. Now the data is doing new work.

(A future post will dig into lean principles beyond the factory floor — including a different take on the 5R's that came out of the same consulting work that led to Industrial Andons.)