Kanban
A Kanban board is a model that was created and used in the 1940s by an engineer at Toyota named Taiichi Ohno. In the Japanese language, kan means sign and ban means board. In Japan at the time, as streets became overcrowded, shop owners would make signs called Kanbans to pull in people off the streets to gain business.
Mr. Ohno also noticed that store shelves were stocked with a specific amount of products to meet the demands of consumers. Once they saw empty space on the shelf, it would be restocked. Mr. Ohno wanted to create a similar system due to Toyota’s decline. He needed a way to do the same thing within the factory while building cars. He developed a system that used Kanban cards to determine when a car was sold so another car could start production. This system helped to identify bottlenecks, reduce stockpiles, improve throughput, and maintain high visibility at the same time. This system also helped Toyota go from an operating loss to being a major competitor...
