Three of the glasses below are filled with orange juice and three are empty. By moving only one glass and not even touching any of the others, can you make an arrangement in which the filled and empty glasses alternate with each other?

Answer at the bottom of this column

Pick up the middle glass of orange juice, pour the juice from it into the middle empty glass and then replace it in its original position.

Is your business reputation safe?

Corporate identity theft

There can be very few people who are not yet aware of identity theft, even amongst those who have not been directly affected by it. But did you know that this is now becoming a crime that is not just targeted at individuals, but also at small businesses?  It is surprisingly easy for fraudsters to change a business's details at Companies House. Using a forged signature they can change the name of the director and the registered address and access the account records. They can then pose as a legitimate business to order goods and services (e.g. cars, computers, mobile phones), damaging that business's reputation when they make off without paying the suppliers. Companies House estimates that there are between 50 and 100 cases of corporate identity theft every month, costing victims between £10,000 and £20,000 per incident.  Here are some tips on how small businesses and suppliers can protect themselves against this.

• Shred all old documents, especially those containing signatures - bin raiding is a common way in which fraudsters access company information
   
• Sign up for PROOF, a protected online filing service at Companies House, using passwords and other security checks
   
• Research new customers carefully - be on the alert if they have recently changed address and contact the former address to ensure the move was genuine
   
• Monitor existing customers - Companies House provides an inexpensive system that will let you know when a particular business registers changes in its directorship. One indicator that a business may have had its identity hijacked is if all the directors change at once
   
• Monitor employees - consider using software such as PKF Finder to check for abnormal activity that may indicate collusion to defraud
   

More advanced monitoring services for larger businesses are offered by the UK's two main credit reference agencies Experian and Equifax.

Dr. Shigeo Shingo was born in Saga City, Japan, in 1909 and was a Japanese industrial engineer who distinguished himself as one of the world's leading experts on manufacturing practices. Among other things, from 1955 he taught seminars in industrial engineering at Toyota for Taiichi Ohno (the subject of the first in our Quality Guru Series - see our January 2010 Newsletter). During this time he worked as a consultant for Toyota, a rarity as Toyota did not in general use consultants, and helped develop and publicize the Toyota Production System (the roots of lean manufacturing, lean thinking and Just in Time - JIT). Although Shigeo Shingo did not single-handedly invent the Toyota Production System(a large part of this being done by Taiichi Ohno),  he was responsible for documenting it and adding two words to the Japanese and English languages - Poka-Yoke (mistake-proofing) and single-minute exchange of dies (SMED), in which set up times are reduced from hours to minutes.

He distinguished between "errors", which are inevitable, and "defects", which result when an error reaches a customer, the aim of Poka-Yoke being to stop errors becoming defects. Using Poka-Yoke in combination with source inspections creates Zero Quality Control, the ideal production system, eliminating the need for inspection of the end product or results, in which errors are examined before they become defects, the production system is stopped and immediate feedback is given so that the root causes of the problem may be identified (source inspection) and controls put in place to prevent them from occurring again (Poke-Yoke), with the addition of a checklist in recognition of the fact that humans can forget or make mistakes.

His most famous book "Total Quality Control" was completed whilst he was still a doctoral student at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Sloan School of Management, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first edition being published in 1951 under the title" Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration". He went on to join the General Electric Company and from 1958 to 1968 was their worldwide Director of Manufacturing Operations and Quality Control, where he had extensive contacts with such companies as Hitachi and Toshiba. This led to his work being discovered by the Japanese at about the same time as Dr. Joseph M Juran visited Japan. (see Quality Guru Series no. 4 in our July 2010 newsletter).

Originally, Dr. Shigeo Shingo had used the term Bake-Yoke (fool-proofing), but one day when he was explaining Bake-Yoke to workers on the factory floor, a young woman started to cry. "Why are you crying?" he asked. "Because I am not a fool" she answered. Extreme politeness is part of the Japanese culture and therefore any insult, however oblique or unintended, causes extreme offence. "I am truly sorry" he said and immediately changed the name from Baka-Yoke to Poka-Yoke (mistake-proofing).

Today Dr. Shigeo Shingo is known far more in the West than in Japan, as a result of his meeting Norman Bodek, an American entrepreneur and founder of Productivity Inc in the USA. In 1981 Norman Bodek had travelled to Japan to learn about the Toyota Production System and came across Dr. Shingo's book "Study of The Toyota Production System", which had been (rather poorly) translated into English in 1980. Norman Bodek took as many copies of this book as he could to the USA, eventually having it re-translated, as well as arranging to translate Dr. Shingo's other books into English. He also brought Dr. Shingo over to lecture in the USA, where his influence extended into fields outside manufacturing e.g. the concepts of SMED, mistake-proofing, and Zero Quality Control have all been applied in the field of sales process engineering.

In 1988, two years prior to his death in 1990, Utah State University honoured him for his lifetime accomplishments and created the Shingo Prize that recognizes world-class, lean organizations and operational excellence.