Standardizing the craftmanship of Pigeon Global’s most skilled visual inspectors

How did Pigeon Global reduce its training time by 80% with eye tracking?

Pigeon Global is a Japanese manufacturer of infant products that prioritize the wellbeing, development, and unique needs of all babies. Pigeon holds a substantial share of the baby bottle market in Japan thanks to a nipple design that works perfectly in tandem with the mother’s breast. The nipple design has earned the trust not just of mothers but of hospitals and maternity wards nationwide.

The majority of the baby bottles sold in Japan are manufactured at the company’s Thai factories. To satisfy the demand for their products, Pigeon Global require a robust quality control system in which humans visually inspect all baby bottles, following a mechanical inspection.

Thai Pigeon has been in business for over 30 years and has an impressive employee retention rate. Even so, a big problem was the need for more structured and documented knowledge sharing between skilled workers and newcomers to ensure consistently high standards of visual inspection and shorter training times. That’s why Thai Pigeon launched a campaign in 2018 called “Let’s raise the next generation”, in an effort to pass critical skills and knowledge from experienced staff down the line to newer arrivals at the organization.

Factory and business innovation manager Mr. Miyamoto decided to use
Tobii Pro Glasses 3 to improve the training processes of visual inspectors. In order to become certified at Pigeon Global, prospective visual inspectors are required to pass a rigorous exam that holds just a 50% pass rate.  By using the wearable eye tracker, Mr. Miyamoto wanted to track the gaze and work patterns of experts and trainees, analyze the differences, and use the insights to improve the number of employees passing the visual inspection test. The eye tracking recordings that followed showed some interesting and previously unseen results.

Generally speaking, the eyesight of new visual inspectors is unsettled, darting around in unpredictable directions and inspecting the baby bottles less efficiently. Expert visual inspectors, on the other hand, have a fixed and steady line of sight that helps them accurately inspect various elements easily.

Expert visual inspectors also had a special level of ingenuity around how and where to look when inspecting baby bottles. For example, the nipple of the bottle can sometimes exhibit small white spots derived from raw materials, a defect that is crucial to catch since it is the first thing a baby interacts with after birth. While newcomers held the bottle up to the light to look for white spots, experts prepared a dark background which allowed them to detect the small white marks more easily. The study helped identify this inefficiency, which in turn enabled 100% of new employees to pass the visual inspection test required to become certified.

Mr Miyamoto was certainly impressed by the results he saw, and told us:

Going forward, Mr. Miyamoto has even bigger plans with Tobii’s solutions at Pigeon Global, saying: