The so-called “traffic light kanban” is usually used to control production via a kanban system. At the shop-floor Kanban orders are often visualized with classical manual Kanban planning Boards. For each item, a green, yellow and red area is calculated. The consumed Kanban cards are placed into the panel manually by hand, in order to visualize the order volume to the employees at the production machine.
But manual Kanban Boards have many significant disadvantages!
These include:
- Slow information flow, because the Kanban signals are transmitted purely manual
- Difficult sending of Kanban signals over long distances
- Difficult handling of many physical paper Kanban cards, especially when many items are produced on the same machine
- Human errors, especially wrongly inserted Kanban cards
- Inaccurate prioritization of the Kanban items (which is the right part that needs to be produced next?)
- less chances for local optimization of production processes
PRODUCTION KANBAN
The e-Kanban system IKS includes an electronic Kanban Board!!
This innovative E-Kanban Board allows the dynamic prioritization of Kanban loops that are visualized in real-time on the screen. Therefor the so called “Traffic-Light” principle will be used to consider also production (minimum) lot-sizes for the production machines.
Our electronic Kanban Board allows 100% Pull based scheduling processes for a production/fabrication environment. All necessary steps to control the production area and the Kanban process will be reduced to a minimum.
In the end very simple but highly efficient Pull processes can be established in the production area.
The advantages of the electronic Kanban Boards are:
- No manual Kanban Boards anymore (reduction of space to put the boards to the shop-floor)
- Elimination of wrong inserted Kanban cards
- Printing of Kanban labels only on demand
- Simple and transparent visualization of all Kanban orders and inventory for a preselected production source in real-time
- Automatic and dynamic prioritization of Kanban orders
- Quick overview on complete Kanban situation, so the operators always know what to produce next
- Simultaneous control of hundreds of Kanban loops is possible without problems
- Take a look into your warehouse without leaving the office
- Scanning of Kanbans directly via e-Kanban Board
- An optional Heijunka sequence visualization of Kanban loops is one of the latest highlight in IKS!
Another very important point:
The innovative web-based e-Kanban Board can also be applied by external suppliers, customers and logistics centers.
TRANSPORT KANBAN
When parts are delivered from an internal or external warehouse to the Kanban supermarket at the shop-floor, we call it “Transport Kanban”, because Kanbans are only moved from A to B.
The process is very similar to a Supplier Kanban and the IKS Web-Portal can be used to realize this process. Via Web-Portal the warehouse team can see all Kanbans that need to be replenished for the different supermarkets in real-time. After picking the new material from the warehouse, the Kanbans will be move back to supermarkets, eg. via “Material milk-run Train”.
The following video shows the successful implementation of production kanban by the IKS e-Kanban system within BAXI in Italy, supported by our Italian partners.
e-Kanban perspectives
Click on your Kanban theme below to get more information!
