Not sure where to begin? Start with Which tool, when. It's the quickest way into every tool on this page.
Engineers and managers built a toolbox over the last hundred years. FMEA. Pareto charts. Control plans. 5 Whys. Plan-Do-Check-Act.
They work. They are also slow and a little tedious for a person. Filling in forty rows of a risk table takes an afternoon.
A bot fills those forty rows in a minute or two. And the tool gives the bot what it needs most: a structure to think through the problem, a way to rank what matters, and a reason to stop before it drowns in detail.
That is our view, anyway, and this series is the case for it. None of the tools are new. That's the point.
Start with Old tools, new workers for the idea behind the series.
Planning tools
- APQP: from what the customer wants to what you check. Turning loose wishes into specific, checkable characteristics.
- Time, cost, quality: the project triangle. Why "faster, cheaper and better" never come free together.
- The quality chain: specs to control plan. How the planning tools hand off to each other.
Risk tools
- FMEA for bots. What could fail, how bad, how likely, how you'd catch it.
- The 80 percent line. Pareto thinking: work the few items that carry most of the risk.
- Risk matrices and SWOT. Quick pictures of risk, and where they fall short.
- Control plans for bots. What gets checked, how often, and what happens when it's off.
Problem-solving tools
- 5 Whys and the fishbone. Digging from the symptom to the cause.
- Plan-Do-Check-Act, and Deming's Study. The loop under everything else.
- Poka-yoke: make the mistake impossible. Design it so it can't go wrong.
Improvement systems
- Lean for bots. The Toyota Production System, waste and stopping the line.
- Six Sigma and DMAIC. Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control.
Machine safety
Factories learned to keep people safe around powerful machines. A lot of it carries over to powerful software.
- Machine safety for bots. The anchor page: guards, interlocks, layers of protection.
- The hierarchy of controls. Removing a capability beats writing a rule.
- Lockout/tagout for bots. Turn it off before you work on it.
- E-stops and fail-safe design. A stop that always works, and silence that means hold.
How this fits with Tools for bots
This page covers the engineering methods. Tools for bots is the umbrella hub: the management tools, like principles, records, document control and review, that these methods sit inside. A management system asks you to address risk, control production and fix causes. It doesn't say which methods to use. These are the usual ones.
Where bots differ
The tools assume the worker is a person who gets tired and bored. A bot doesn't. That's the advantage.
But the tools also assume the person filling them in knows the product and has seen the factory floor. A bot hasn't. It can fill a risk table with plausible rows that don't belong to your product. Every page in this series comes back to the same rule: the bot does the groundwork, a person checks it against reality and decides.