Automation with a human touch — building quality into the process by giving machines and workers the ability to detect abnormalities and stop production immediately. The concept originated with sakichi-toyoda's invention of an automatic loom that stopped itself when a thread broke, preventing defective cloth from being produced. taiichi-ohno applied this principle to automobile manufacturing: every worker has the authority to stop the production line when they detect a defect, using the andon cord. This is the radical opposite of traditional mass production, where the line never stops and defects are caught (if at all) by end-of-line inspection. Jidoka and just-in-time are the two pillars of TPS. shigeo-shingo's poka-yoke (mistake-proofing) extended jidoka by designing processes so defects cannot occur in the first place. Described in toyota-production-system-beyond-large-scale-production.