How Kanban Skills Can Improve Employability

Improving employability is a something that everyone should strive for, in order to keep people engaged and driven in the workplace. Doing this can be a hard balance to strike whilst keeping staff morale high and trying to improve efficiency and productivity. One of the skills that someone can complete in a business to assist with this is improvement type projects. Things like green, black and master black belt projects are all types of these activities that get you formal accreditation and show that you have made a tangible cost saving or cost avoidance improvement to a business.

Another one of these skills that make your employability more secure is completing and facilitating a Kanban project. With this specific concept still growing mainly in a manufacturing environment, this skill is one that people are looking to grab on to.

What is Kanban?

Kanban was introduced in the 1940’s in Asia (Japan) and is used religiously in the automotive industry in places like Toyota. Its concept when launched didn’t really catch on however more recently in the last few decades this is now seen worldwide. The main uniqueness about the Kanban concept is that it is a pull system rather than your conventional push system. Effectively the voice of the customer is at the heart of this and the process leading up to the customer will only manufacture to the exact needs of them. This can be hard if you don’t have good yield rates therefore to make this work effectively, you must have a pretty stable process. You will find Kanban not only in the automotive industry but also there is a great presence of this in the aerospace industry also. You can find more information on Kanban processes here.

Kanban Implementation

In order to implement Kanban in the workplace, not only do you require the technical skills to understand the value stream and process but you will require a lot of softer type skill such as “influencing”. Most manufacturing areas will be used to their conventional push way of working and may have done so for many decades. Someone then trying to change this, may come across some resistance. The main thing here to understand is the business need and benefit. This can be along the lines of reducing things like excess inventory (parts on the shelf with no customer demand is cash caught up in your company) or improve the productivity. In addition to this, when Kanban is actually implemented, you will immediately identify any bottlenecks in your process. Clearly this is something anyone wants to know about their value stream and the Kanban Process will help flush this out. When you then know about the bottleneck, it’s important that action is taken to then fix this as if left unaddressed it will have a significant impact on your lead time and slow the whole process down.

Stakeholders of the Kanban need to have bought into this during the implementation stage or the full initiative wont work. This will be from logistics functions, manufacturing and operations teams. All these people are relied upon to ensure that the real customer expectation is made clear and that the teams then work to this requirement and continue to update things like Kanban boards in order to understand the work in progress position at any one time.

Kanban Boards

These can be pretty simple boards placed in key areas or you could go for the more innovative technological route and have these on screens. If you choose to have the more advanced options then this may be costly and there are several ways of doing this. In respect to tracking WIP, some places may have routers / batch cards for each of the operational steps. With these routers may be bar codes that operators or inspectors need to scan in order to signify the correct operation they are at. Once completed they would again scan this. This is a pretty reliable way to understand your WIP progress however again all relies on the people involved complying to this process as if they don’t buy into it from the start the information will then become inaccurate and wasted.

Using the old-fashioned Kanban boards is probably the most cost effective way of doing this and to be fair works fine. These are usually placed in the key areas on the shop floor or at the process’s where the most focus is at. The boards are cards or tickets that must be moved along the operational sequence (where the full value stream is marked on the board) to signify the WIP position. The customer demand will be seen very clearly on this and kept up to date by the relevant person showing exactly what is required and by when.