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Andon: What Is It?

Andon is the Japanese term for “lamp”.  In Lean terms an Andon becomes a visual management tool that shows the status of operations at a single glance, and highlights when things are not working as they should.

The typical Andon can show things like production status, machine downtime and faults or delays in a process step.  It is often shown on a board with the process stations numbered, and lit either green (normal operations) or red (defect or delay).

An Andon cord or button refers to how a team-mate notifies everyone that the process is not working as it should – by pulling the chord or pushing the button the process can stop, the Andon can be changed to red, and passing on defective product to downstream processes can be avoided.

An Andon is a part of Autonomation (Jidoka) and Visual Management.

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