Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Eye Plugs Required

Nobody is perfect in this world and that goes for me too. Even in my quest for perfection based on the Toyota way, things sometimes get off track. I was reviewing and updating some quality inspection work instructions recently when I noticed something odd.

In our work instructions, we include safety notes and required PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) to perform the job safely. I even found some cool icons to add to give it a visual boost. After the edit was complete, a quick spell check was ran to double check for errors. So far, nothing out of the ordinary.

Then I saw it, plain as day. Under the icon I used for ear plugs, I accidentally typed in eye plugs. So much for spell check. To make matters worse, this work instruction was for the inspection process. (I bet if you asked some of our customers, they would agree that eye plugs were used in the past and on more than one occasion).

We had a good laugh over this mistake and made some fast corrections before it was released. Spell check works great in many cases. However, a second set of eyes would have probably seen the error because I obviously was wearing my eye plugs.

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