Mizen Boushi is a Japanese term (Used in Toyota Product Development Systems and others in Japan) for Mistake Prevention or "designing in quality". It seems to be a cousin of Poke Yoke which is on a smaller scale, "mistake proofing", on physical things. The notch in your Mobile Telephone SIM card is a Poke Yoke method to make sure that you can put it inside the mobile phone in only one way!
Mizen Boushi in Product Design is making sure that manufacturing mistakes or assembly mistakes cannot be made by altering the product design itself in such a way that mistakes are not possible. For example, car platforms and subsystems like chassis, drive trains, engine assemblies are standardized and tested in so many models that by now you have a very good idea of how reliable they are and how easily manufacturable they are without making quality mistakes.
Then each year for a major automobile model redesign or minor redesign for that model year you just redesign the external appearances, body, etc leaving the component systems the same. This way you are reducing the total number of mistakes that can be made in the whole design and manufacture of the car.
Mistake proofing or Mizen Boushi is just as applicable to business processes or service processes just the same way they are for product design and manufacturing.
People, Process and Tools can be addressed systematically for mistake proofing business processes.
Mistakes are made with people with respect to capacity or capability. In a business process if there are not enough people with the right skillsets at the right time to meet demand at that time, capacity mistakes are made. If enough people with the right skills are not available in a business process or service process, then capability mistakes are made. Multiskilling of people is a very effective way of addressing both problems. The more the breadth of skills of people involved in a business process, the more the organization and the individual get out of it. For the organization, they can leverage people in other business processes that do not have enough to do in those that have peak demand. For the individual, being useful in multiple parts of the organization, and needed, results in higher morale!
Process mistakes can be avoided by initial and ongoing training and extensive on the job training with periodic skill upgrades. Extensive documentation of the process as well as easy and ready access to these while doing the job (like online PDF documents, for example) can all be good ways to reduce process mistakes.
Mizen Boushi can be implemented extensively in Tools. Most business processes use software applications or products as tools. Extensive onscreen validation of what is being typed in, as well as clever mistake proofing can go a long way. For example, instead of asking for the city and then the zip code, have the person type in the zip code, the system pulls up the city and is verified. Mistakes made in typing in the city wrongly can be avoided. They can all be simple things by themselves, but together, they add up to more prevention of mistakes! Monitoring of system availability, usability studies, monitoring of system response time, monitoring of network availability can all be other mistake proofing techniques.
Mizen Boushi can just as easily be applied to business processes and services!
It’s always helpful to learn from your mistakes because then your mistakes seem worthwhile! – Garry Marshall
