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anban
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This article is about the lean manufacturing process. For the software development process, see Kanban (development).

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Kanbans maintain inventory levels; a signal is sent to produce and deliver a new shipment as material is consumed. These signals are tracked through thereplenishment cycle and bring extraordinary visibility to suppliers and buyers.[1]
Kanban (かんばん(看板)?) (literally signboard or billboard) is a scheduling system for lean and just-in-time (JIT) production. According to its creator, Taiichi Ohno, kanban is one means through which JIT is achieved.[2][3]
Kanban is not an inventory control system but rather a scheduling system that helps determine what toproduce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.
The need to maintain a high rate of improvement led Toyota to devise the kanban system. Kanban became an effective tool to support the running of the production system as a whole. In addition, it proved to be an excellent way for promoting improvements because reducing the number of kanban in circulation highlighted problem areas.[4]
Contents[hide]
1 Origins
2 Operation
2.1 Kanban cards
2.2 Toyota's six rules
2.3 Three-bin system
3 Electronic kanban systems
4 Personal kanban
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links
[edit]Origins

In the late 1940s, Toyota started studying supermarkets with the idea of applying store and shelf-stocking techniques to the factory floor. In a supermarket, customersobtain the required quantity at the required time. Furthermore, the supermarket stocks only what it believes it will sell, and customers take only what they need because future supply is assured. This observation led Toyota to view a process as being a customer of preceding processes, and the preceding processes as a kind of store. The customer "process" goes to the store to obtain required componentswhich in turn causes the store to restock. Originally, as in supermarkets, signboards were used to guide "shopper" processes to specific restocking locations.
Kanban uses the rate of demand to control the rate of production, passing demand from the end customer up through the chain of customer-store processes. In 1953, Toyota applied this logic in their main plant machine shop.[5][edit]Operation

An important determinant of the success of production scheduling based on demand "pushing" is the ability of the demand-forecast to receive such a "push".
Kanban, by contrast, is part of an approach of receiving the "pull" from the demand. Therefore, the supply or production is determined according to the actual demand of the customers. In contexts where supply time is lengthy and demand isdifficult to forecast, the best one can do is to respond quickly to observed demand. This difficulty is exactly what a kanban system can help with: it is used as a demand signal that immediately propagates through the supply chain. This can be used to ensure that intermediate stocks held in the supply chain are better managed (usually smaller). Where the supply response cannot be quick enough tomeet actual demand fluctuations (causing significant lost sales), stock building may be deemed more appropriate and is achieved by issuing more kanban. Taiichi Ohno states that to be effective, kanban must follow strict rules of use[6] (Toyota, for example, has six simple rules, below) and that close monitoring of these rules is a never-ending task to ensure that the kanban does what is required....