PP - KANBAN

Purpose
Kanban is a procedure for controlling production and material flow based on the physical
material stock in production. Material that is required on a regular basis is continually kept
available in small quantities in production. With Kanban, the replenishment or production of a
material is triggered only when a certain quantity of the material has been consumed. This
replenishment is triggered directly by production using previously maintained master data.
Entries in the system are reduced to a minimum - for example, to the input of a bar code. All
other actions in the system are carried out automatically in the background.
With Kanban, the production process is designed to control itself and the manual posting effort is
reduced as far as possible. The effects of this are the shortening of lead times and reductions in
stock levels.
With Kanban, the impulse or signal for the delivery of material can consist in the work center
that needs a material (consumer, demand source) sending a card to the work center that produces
the material (producer, supply source), for example. This card describes which material and how
much of it is required, and where it is to be delivered. These cards (in Japanese "kanbans") have
given this procedure its name. When the material is received, the goods receipt at the demand
source can be posted automatically via a further kanban signal per bar code.
The following graphic illustrates the Kanban principle:

Implementation Considerations
If you want to make optimum use of the Kanban principle, your production must satisfy a
number of requirements:
 The consumption of the kanban parts should be relatively constant within a period that is
longer than the replenishment lead time of a kanban. Assume that a material is
periodically needed in large quantities but not needed at all at other times. In this case,
 you have to have a large number of kanbans to ensure the supply of material, but at the
same time you will have relatively high stock levels when the material is not needed.
 The supply source should be capable of producing a large number of small lots within a
short period. To this end, the setup times in production have to be reduced to a minimum
and the reliability of production has to be increased. Waiting until several kanbans for a
material have been sent to the supply source before starting production defeats the whole
point of the Kanban method of production control.