Mumbai University > Mechanical Engineering > Sem 8 > Industrial Engineering And Management

Marks: 5M

Year: May 2015

Kanban (literally signboard or billboard in Japanese) is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. Kanban is a system to control the logistical chain from a production point of view, and is an inventory control system.

• Kanban was developed by Taiichi Ohno, an industrial engineer at Toyota, as a system to improve and maintain a high level of production.
• Problem areas are highlighted by reducing the number of kanban in circulation.
• The Kanban Method is as an approach to incremental, evolutionary process and systems change for organizations. It uses a work-in-progress limited pull system as the core mechanism to expose system operation (or process) problems and stimulate collaboration to continuously improve the system.
• Visualization is an important aspect of Kanban as it allows to understand the work and the workflow.

The Kanban Method is rooted in four basic principles:

1. Start with existing process
2. The Kanban method does not prescribe a specific set of roles or process steps.
3. The Kanban method starts with existing roles and processes and stimulates continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes to the system. The Kanban method is a change management method.
4. Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change
5. Respect the current process, roles, responsibilities and titles
6. Leadership at all levels
7. Acts of leadership at all levels in the organization, from individual contributors to senior management, are encouraged.