I recently came across ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kanban’ at Gemba Panta Rei which put a smile on my face. It’s a great post on the history of kanban.

It made me think about when I first came across a kanban process in the manufacturing plants and has inspired me to write down the story. As it’s quite a few years ago now some of the details are a little hazy but I’m sure some of my old FoMoCo colleagues will jump in and correct my inaccuracies.

It all started for me when I started a new role in FoMoCo’s Plant Floor Systems team. The team that I joined was called Synchronous Material Flow, which from what I could gather was an incredibly complicated way of saying ‘the team that helps plan and co-ordinate the movement of materials around the plants’.

This team had spent a number of years trying to solve a problem: how to manage the flow of parts from the supplier deliveries to the correct points on the production line as effectively as possible. Being a smart bunch of people the team had modeled the process, looked at the available technology and come up with a solution. Here’s how the system worked…

When a vehicle moved down the line the VIN number (unique identifier) of the vehicle was scanned and a look-up performed in the Bill of Materials (BoM). The BoM contains a hierarchy of all the parts required to build each vehicle so we could use this information to call in the parts to the right place on the line at the right time. Unfortunately this process had a problem; it was rubbish.

There were still quality problems, inventory problems and all the other manufacturing headache’s. This is the point that we started to look at how Toyota managed the same problem and found that what they did was quite different…

When the guy on the line started a new box of parts, he’d take a card off the top and put it into a letterbox. Every 10 minutes or so another guy would drive around in a little truck and collect up all the cards. He’d then go to an office where he had a card sorter connected to a computer. He’d put the cards through the sorter, which at the same time sent messages on usage to the supplier network, and then he’d go and fill up his truck based on the cards that he had, returning the cards to the boxes. The cycle then started again. Kanban literally translates to ‘card’.

We’d made a couple of mistakes. Firstly, we’d created a push process. We were predicting the demand based on scheduling rather than the actual demand at the line. Secondly, we missed a key ingredient in the process: humans. In the kanban process the people would talk to each other. They’d talk about poor batches of components, issues they were having installing them and work together to solve them; people generally don’t like to knowingly do a poor job. This is what I believe Jidoka to be; the harmony of humans and technology to get the optimum result.

So, of course we moved to a kanban process and I was lucky enough to work on the development of the IT system that supported it. Once the basic kanban process is in place there are lot’s of interesting things that can be done to calculate cycle times, minimum and maximum stock levels etc. to optimise the process.

So, that what was my first experience of applying a kanban process and the improvements that can be achieved. The next question is how do we appy this kind of thinking to IT? More on this soon…