The Kanban roots

The word “kanban” means a signal card, signboard, billboard, visual card or just a card. Kan means “a sign”, while Ban means “board”. What is interesting, the word exists in Japanese and Chinese, yet they’re obviously differently pronounced. Another interesting fact to notice is that the term first appeared in Japan around 1603! That was the time Japan’s economy was flourishing and Japanese streets were packed with shops.

Toyota Production System and Lean Manufacturing

The Toyota Company wasn’t such a giant as it is nowadays. After WWII the car industry got stuck, and so had Toyota, which was generating losses. That Toyota’s product delivery system wasn’t effective. The man who made a change in this organization was a Japanese engineer Taiichi Ōno, who joined the company in 1943. He created a new manufacturing philosophy that was called Toyota Production System: precursor to Lean Manufacturing. Its philosophy was to get rid of all waste in work process, which in Japanese was conveyed as ”muda”. The term means ”uselessness” or “wastelessness”. Simply speaking, waste is anything that adds no value to the process, to the people doing the work, and to the customer. Hence, one of the goals of TPS was to identify which activities add value and which don’t. In 2003 the system was applied in software development and was called Lean Software Development.

7 types of waste

Ohno differentiated and categorized seven types of waste. These referred to Transportation, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Overprocessing and Defects.

Kanban

Two pillars of TPS

Now we’re aware that the main idea of TPS was to complete eliminate all waste possible. Toyota Production System was based on two concepts how the things were done. It was sometimes referred to as the Toyota Way.

It simply means no matter how successful we are now, there is always something that we could do better. We’re open to creating new alternatives. Much of it is taken from the Kaizen philosophy.

Much has been said about it. There are two levels of respect: the individual one and the collective one. Respecting one another is a prerequisite for trust to be built. Trust gives rise to common understanding and goals. Respect is also translated in teamwork.

Kanban, TPS and Lean

Lean and Kanban are sometimes conflated, as they both derive from TPS. However, they’re not 100% the same things. Lean is not another name for TPS, although they’ve got a lot of common. TPS is philosophical (Kaizen) shift towards work, while lean is based on a set of tools. Another difference is TPS has 7 wastes, while Lean 8. Lean added “non-utilized talent” as the 8th waste. What’s more, while the latter is mainly waste elimination, the former is not. Rather, TPS highlights the problems we have to sort them out. Kanban takes ideas from both approaches.

English trainer; learning environment creator; Crazy about EdTech, EdDesign and work visualization tools. I apply Agile techniques in teaching, esp Scrum. Scrum and Kanban mentee. Process improver.