Marcio Miike Jr. / Notes

Writing down what a veteran knows

On a factory floor, the fastest way to find the cause of a defect is to ask the person who has seen it before. That person retires. The work is to get their answers into a form everyone can search.

searches that found nothing show what to ask next Ahead of time When a defect appears write stored finds search Veteran watched and asked Symptom Cause Fix one case, with tags Index every case Likely causes each with its fix Defect described in words searches that found nothing show what to ask next Ahead of time When a defect appears write stored finds Veteran watched and asked Symptom Cause Fix one case, with tags Index every case Defect described in words Likely causes each with its fix
What the veteran knows is written down as cases, each with a symptom, a cause and a fix. A defect described in words finds the nearest cases. The searches that find nothing say what to ask the veteran next.

Reading the picture

The top row is slow work done by people. We watched the veterans on the floor and asked them about past trouble, and wrote down what they said.

The green box is the form we wrote it in. A veteran does not think in documents. They think in cases: I have seen this before, it was that, we did this. So each record has the same three parts, and tags that let people narrow the search.

When a defect appears, someone describes it in their own words. The search returns the nearest cases, with the likely causes and what fixed them. How the search itself works is in another note.

The dotted line

The system keeps a log of what people search for. The searches that find nothing are a list of what has not been written down yet. That list is the next conversation with the veteran.

What it did

I ran this project for an auto parts maker from November 2024 to March 2025. The time to find the cause of a defect went from 25 minutes to 9 on average. We also showed what the system would return over time, and the company approved the budget for the next phase.

I first saw this problem on my family’s farm, where much of the work is judgment that nobody has written down.