What Is Kanban? (Kanban Definition - Kanban Meaning)

Kanban takes its name from the cards that track production within a factory. It's a scheduling system for lean manufacturing and just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing.

Kanban Definition

In Japanese, Kanban (看板) means signboard or billboard. Taiichi Ohno (February 29, 1912 - May 28, 1990), an industrial engineer at Toyota, developed Kanban to improve production effectiveness and reduce waste.

Kanban became an efficient framework to support running a production system as a whole and an excellent way to promote improvement. Identification of the lead time and the cycle time of a given process and its associated sub-processes, and incompatibilities among them highlight problem areas.

One of the main differences of Kanban compared to other processes is that it explicitly establishes an upper limit to work in progress inventory to prevent overcapacity. Less is more to get results (Remember how the Google landing page looks like). However, as human beings, we are tempted to get trapped with Complexity Bias.

Kanban establishes maximum limits on the number of products waiting at supply points. Afterward, the Kanban team identifies and addresses any inefficiencies in their workflow. When a limit is exceeded, investigate the cause and follow explicit policies for any exception. This can reveal an inefficiency or an opportunity to improve the process.

Therefore, it's safe to say that a central goal of manufacturing Kanban is to restrict excess inventory; in knowledge work, Kanban optimizes the flow of value. The purpose of the Kanban team is to eliminate this excess inventory at any point in production. That will lead to better allocation of available resources (human, tools, financial) to increase business throughput and profitability, and to remove waste, bottlenecks in the processes.