Production Kanbans

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This type of Kanban is probably one of the most used and the most basic types of kanban. The card is used in manufacturing and software development to trigger production. 

  One common way for the production of kanban to start is with a list of everything that needs to be completed in a specific time.  A workstation then provides a production kanban to an area requesting the types of materials or tasks they need produced. This signals the production system to start.  The production kanban will explain key details such as the quality and quantity of the things that need to be produced.  
Example

1. Let’s say you have three different points.  An internal supplying process, a store or holding area and an assembly or downstream customer process. 
2. The customer process, in this case assembly, receives some form of production order or instructions.
3. The material handler that works with the assembly process goes to the upstream store and withdraws the items that the assembly process has demand for.
4. The supplying process then produces to replenish what was withdrawn from the store.

As you can see the production Kanban triggers the upstream process to replenish the store.  This keeps the lines full and works only on the pull of actual demand.  This is a major difference than the traditional push system as the pull approach using production kanbans controls the supplying process rather than by a schedule. In this manner the supplying process only produces what the customer process has actually used, and the two processes become linked together in a customer and supplier relationship.

This Information Comes From Our JIT Course!