The Kanban Framework
- Nick Vosniakos
- Mar 25, 2020
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 24, 2024
As a strategic manager and an innovative thinker, I always try to apply during my work new methods and disruptive approaches that will help improve the quality of the work. When you are accepting a project or beginning something new, it is essential to stay organized in order to manage the huge workload. The same happens with organizations in a product development process when everybody tries for the best outcome. Many times I am called to solve complex project management problems, related to multitasking and overlapping activities. One of the many tools that I suggest is “The Kanban Board” which I think is the most effective way to organize your workload.
Lean manufacturing
Lean is a set of tools that assist in the identification and elimination of waste that might improve quality as well as production time and cost. Lean means manufacturing without waste. Lean manufacturing, or lean production, is a production method derived from Toyota's 1930 operating model "The Toyota Way" (Toyota Production System, TPS). The concept of Lean Thinking (LT) originated from Toyota Production System (TPS) that determined the value of any process by distinguishing value-added activities or steps from non-value-added activities or steps and eliminating waste so that every step adds value to the process (Antony, 2011). Ohno (1988) describes lean production as an alternative way of organizing mass production, suggesting that large volumes are intrinsically associated with the lean production paradigm. Jones and Womack (2017) describe lean thinking and practice as the most successful approach to business improvement of our generation, suggesting that it has outlasted many other improvement approaches and has been taken up by organizations in all kinds of industries across the world.
Lean manufacturing consists of five key principles:
Precisely specify value by specific product, desired by the customer
Identify the value stream for each product, challenging wastes
Make value flow without interruptions, continuously through the remaining value-added steps
Let customer pull value from the producer
Pursue perfection
Kanban System
Kanban is a scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time manufacturing (JIT). Just-in-time manufacturing is a methodology aimed primarily at reducing times within the production system as well as response times from suppliers and to customers. Its origin and development were in Japan, largely in the 1960s and 1970s and particularly at Toyota. “Just-In-Time” is an approach based on the customer’s demands. The goal of this approach is to create more value for the customer without incurring any extra cost.
Kanban is a Japanese term and literally means “visual sign” or “signboard”. It is a management principle that originated from the Toyota Production System (TPS). In the late 1940s, Toyota incorporated “Just in Time” manufacturing into their work processes. Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed kanban to improve manufacturing efficiency. Kanban is one method to achieve JIT, as Sugimori et al. (1977) describe the Kanban system as the production control system that was developed to materialize just-in-time production. The system takes its name from the cards that track production within a factory.
Kanban actually refers to the signboard on which the so-called Kanban cards were typically displayed:
"Kanji characters for Kanban"
The first character – Kan – is made up of the symbols for hand and eye. It represents a man shielding his brow in order to see clearly, and means “to look at closely”.
The second character – Ban – is made of the symbols for tree, wood, and wall. It represents a wooden board leaning against a wall, and literally means “wooden board”.
In essence, then, Kanban means “to look closely at the wooden board”.
Originally, Kanban cards are a key component of kanban and they signal the need to move materials within a production facility or to move materials from an outside supplier into the production facility. The kanban card is, in effect, a message that signals the depletion of products, parts, or inventory. When received, the kanban triggers the replenishment of that product, part, or inventory. Consumption, therefore, drives demand for more production, and the kanban card signals demand more products—so kanban cards help create a demand-driven system. A Kanban card is a signal that provides the authorization to order or produce parts such as to replenish those which have been consumed in a “take one, make one” fashion.
Lean manufacturing is one that meets high throughput or service demands with very little inventory. In a lean manufacturing system, Kanban as a tool may control the levels of buffer inventories in the system to regulate production. For lean manufacturing, Kanban serves as a tool to regulate production quantities. In the manufacturing environment, Kanban are signals used to replenish the inventory of items used repetitively within a facility (Balram, 2003). The Kanban system is one of the manufacturing strategies for lean production with minimal inventory and reduced costs.
Kanban became an effective tool to support running a production system as a whole, and an excellent way to promote improvement. Problem areas are highlighted by measuring lead time and cycle time of the full process and process steps. Kanban Scheduling Systems applies original lean concepts to coordinate work queues (Tregubov and Lane, 2015). In general, there are varieties of tools and techniques used in determining an effective manufacturing system in a company. Kanban system is just one of the tools and techniques used in lean manufacturing besides other techniques. Using a Kanban system is a strategic operational decision to be used in the production lines. It helps to improve the company’s productivity and at the same time minimize waste in production. The Kanban system requires production only when the demand for products is available.
Kanban board and Kanban cards
Kanban is used as a work-visualization mechanism in project management where Kanban boards and daily stand-up meetings have been the primary mechanisms for success. Kanban is very flexible. It can easily overlay existing workflows without disrupting already existing systems. Nevertheless, Kanban will naturally identify problems in the process and fix them. In addition, Kanban is versatile and easy to implement. Also, Kanban can be introduced incrementally without fear of "culture shock". Hence, with Kanban, there is no need to make drastic changes and heavy organizational change management.
Kanban can simply be translated as "board", and provides an effective form of visual management for production control in any environment. The Kanban board is the most effective way to visualize your workflow and enable your team to gain control over what is to be done and what is currently being worked on. Kanban boards allow addressing the lack of process visibility in a multilevel environment. The purpose of Kanban boards is to provide visibility of work in progress. So, a Kanban board is used to visualize and materialize available work, work-in-process, and completed work, as an effective means of process management.
A Kanban board is one of the tools that can be used to implement Kanban to manage work at a personal or organizational level. You can create your own Kanban board and use it every day, transforming a whiteboard into a task board, to help you organize all of your projects. A Kanban Board consists of 5 columns that are used to organize tasks.
Backlog or Stories-Ideas
Requested or To do
In progress or Doing
In review or Verifying-Testing
Completed or Done
There is also, sometimes, a 6th horizontal lane for “Fast track – Urgent” tasks or defects.
In the first column you insert all of your ideas, in a backlog, each idea written on a different sticky note (Kanban card). In the second column, you choose some of the ideas from the ideas column and you transfer them on the right, at the 2nd column, into a waiting mode in order to do them. In this column, you also add the tasks that you were not planning to do but assigned to you or requested by others. Next, from this requested column you choose the tasks that you will start working on and transfer them to the right, at the column called “In progress”. When you finish your work you place this task “in review” (4th column) and start working on something else from the 3rd column. Later you can come back to test the tasks on the 4th column or request from someone else to be involved in the verification, depending on the nature of the task. Finally, each task that has been verified, is transferred to the last column signaling that this job is “done”. If you have more tasks and a more complex organizational structure you can draw horizontal pool lanes for each department (next picture). As you can understand you create a dynamic workflow and you visualize your progress as you move cards across the board. You establish a process for every project and can identify bottlenecks, work overload and delays as you move the cards around.
Following the general pull-principle of “one-out-one-in” as soon as one of the jobs “in progress” or “in review” are completed, capacity becomes available to process one of the “To-do” jobs. This subsequently releases capacity for the next task from the “Backlog” to be pulled into “To-do”. Team members are empowered to manage the workflow by moving the cards across the board themselves, in real-time. Based on the constant work-in-process principle, the Kanban board explicitly limits the number of tasks that can be assigned. Having set a limit for WIP, or what Hopp & Spearman (2004) refer to as a WIP-cap, a pull mechanism is created in the Kanban board. This is visually indicated by the fact that there is also limited room on the board for extra cards.
Using a Kanban Board
Kanban boards visually depict work at various stages of a process using cards to represent work items and columns to represent each stage of the process. Cards are moved from left to right to show progress and to help coordinate teams performing the work. Kanban boards can be used in knowledge work or for manufacturing processes. There are many applications of Kanban boards in practice, like product development, software development, healthcare, hr, organizational strategy and executive leadership, marketing teams, personal task management, audit teams. There are many companies that have applied this framework to stay organized and thrive.
Each team can create its own Kanban board to organize its projects. In a Kanban board, you can visualize and spot weaknesses in the workflow, limit work in progress and focus on one thing at a time. The overall goal of the board is to distribute knowledge and energy across the board, ensuring that too many items are not in progress at the same time. This saves time and monitors the whole workflow and the completed tasks. You can easily implement improvements and minimize wasted time. This is in fact reflected rather well when one considers the application of lean thinking and practice where the agile approach promotes the use of Kanban in its more primitive sense – the signboard.
Every day, all team members gather around the Kanban board in what’s known as a daily huddle, scrum, or stand-up meeting (typically maximum 15 minutes long). During this meeting, the participants discuss what was achieved on the previous day, the plan for today, and any problems that may need to be addressed in order to achieve the plan. In this manner, Kanban also encourages, promotes and fosters collaboration and team-based problem solving to increase throughput in the production system (Powell, 2018). In addition, it is important to keep every member of the team focused on a few tasks, by setting limits to the cards that can be on board or to stick someone.
The creation of a Kanban Board is very easy. The only thing you need is a whiteboard and sticky notes. There are also virtual solutions that encompass Kanban Boards to visualize your progress as you move cards across the board and boost your productivity.
Kanban board is an effective means for production control in high-mix, low-volume environments (Powell, 2018). The Kanban philosophy and Task Boards are also used in agile project management to coordinate tasks in project teams, achieving a nearly 50% reduction of lead-time. Implementation of Kanban can be described in the following manner:
The workflow consists of logical steps.
There are two steps to a workflow visualization, queue, and work in progress/process.
The team in charge decides on the maximum amount of work each step of the workflow can hold.
Work is pushed into the queue step and pulled in the in a process step.
If need be, work is halted in two successive stages to clear bottleneck.
Kanban Framework is a very useful dynamic tool for project management that can be used from anyone who deals with a huge workload and wants to maximize the deliverables.