Visual Management Methods Used by the Professionals

In today’s world of I pads and Smartphone’s a lot of companies usually go for the high-tech versions of things like touch screen monitors and ultra high speed internet. So if someone goes to their office and tells them that they only need to use a simple board to improve their productivity they may start laughing at the person saying it.

But if you get down to the basics a visual management board is all a company needs in order to get their processes in tip top shape. The first people who invented the visual board for use in businesses are as usual the Japanese. Engineers from Toyota was buying supplies at a grocery store when they saw that the stock clerks were putting pieces of paper indicating what supplies are about to run out. These way the supply clerks will see what was about to run out and supply it immediately. This way the inventory was always Just in Time. So no space was being wasted by putting too much supply of a product at one time. That means that other products can be displayed.

This was then used by the Engineers from Toyota to make their inventory better because as you know cars take up a lot of space and their warehouses should be optimally used. The process was so successful that other companies started using their boards or Kanban boards as they call it there, to improve their processes. Now this process invented by those brilliant Toyota engineers is now called Lean management, and in the heart of it all is the Visual Board.

Since everything now is being shifted towards the interne, the same thing is being done to the Visual Board. Now boards are digital and can be configure to cater to your businesses needs, since it is digital there is no limit to the number of process you can put into it. You can create groups, sub groups, and so on and so forth. Most boards now can also be hooked up on to the internet, now even if your offices are between continents, they can coordinate with each in order to fully optimize your production.

There are a lot digital board makers right now, but the one I use is from a company called Leankor, you can find their website at http://www.leankor.com and you can talk to their super friendly customer service personnel that will assist you with any question you have about digital boards.

Kanban Across the Board

The Kanban Board is not only a central artefact of the Kanban system used in lean and Just in Time, or JIT, production (and Agile software development), but quite literally drives the operational management system. The word Kanban is the Japanese term for a signal, which is why Kanban cards are signals used to alert team’s , an item or service when a change in the workflow occurs. The Kanban board is centrally located in a visible location to a team of people who are working in tandem to deliver timely products or services to internal/external customers.

Kanban Board

Kanban is a system where the flow of work is measured and known to everyone all the time. This reduces the time lags   relative to more conventional, or more established, management methodologies. It was developed by Toyota as early as the 1950s, when they took inspiration from the way supermarkets handle the sale of groceries. Customers generally only buy in smaller quantities, i.e. what they need in the short term, and the supermarket determines its stock levels by what it is selling. Toyota went on to apply the paradigm to its manufacturing in general, where one process could play the role of customer and the process that precedes it the role of supermarket. This metaphorical supermarket in the manufacturing environment would use visible signboards so signal the availability of its ‘end’ product to the ‘customer’, the next process that uses that product as a starting point. This type of communication driven system dramatically reduces the very often unnecessary costs of keeping large amounts of inventory throughout the production process.

This Kanban philosophy was adopted, quite early, by the software development industry. Software development is often plagued by mismatches between planning and production, where market requirements change right as the process of developing a computer software program is midway through its software development life cycle, or SDLC. So instead of overloading workers with one giant ‘push’ style of task management in a big bang approach, development team members ‘pull’ tasks (called ‘stories’ in Agile/lean) from a centrally visible queue of work called the backlog. In this environment, such a Kanban board can be digital to include remote teams. The work is divided into columns, or workflows, and rows are created as swim lanes. New tasks are placed in the first workflow lane, and are considered to be in queue. It is the responsibility of one team, who when finished, marks the card as complete, and/or places the card into the backlog queue of the next lane, making it available for the next team in the process to pull into their process lane.

Digital Kanban Board

Because this card signaling system is easy to learn and understand, yet powerful enough to regulate complex workflows, Kanban has become much more widespread in its application, and is used across a great many industries, including health care, business management and finance. Teams, use the Kanban board to organize their daily to do lists and other tasks to reduce the challenge of intermediate hand offs being lost or delayed. Moreover, the use of cloud-based collaboration solutions which incorporate Kanban allow geographically dispersed teams to easily coordinate the flow of work while sharing a virtual Kanban boards and signaling each other via mobile devices.

The Kanban way of life is spreading well outside of production, and niche industries like software development. 

Kanban methodology is now penetrating health care, construction, finance and the oil and gas industries.  That’s because all these industries have repetitive workflows that need to be optimized to reduce waste and improve the economic benefit.  Take a look around your business and consider if a visual Kanban board can improve your team’s workflow.