Kanban Made Simple. Mit CD-ROM: Demystifying and Applying Toyota's Legendary Manufacturing Process [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Kanban Made Simple is a great book to help in teaching people how to implement Kanbans. While many people conceptually understand Kanban, they do not understand all the elements that go into sizing the kanban and into the design of the kanban. This book addresses all these elements (sizing, type, visual management, rollout, and batch size reduction)in a step by step method. I recommend it to all my clients.

A few years ago I was looking for a book about how to size a kanban system. This book is exactly about this topic and follows a step by step approach. Many people believe, that implementing a Pull-system is possible by following cooking-receipts, it is not. Anyone thinking about implementation of a Pull-system, should first understand when it makes sense and when there are better alternatives for your business. Pull-systems can be used as long as your product variaty is not to broad and when demand varies within +/- 20%.

The book starts with what data has to be collected and even gives some hints about consistent data (even wrong data examples are given). What I missed a little bit, are more information about the real meaning of the replenishment interval and sometimes the numbers calculated in the example seem to be rounded in a fancy manner.

Furthermore when sizing the kanbans it would be usefull to have a better description (example/ sketch) what the replenishment quantity and buffer quantity means. Without this information the reader beeing new in this area has to make a guess on his own. The different visual signs and cards (+equivalents) to control your kanban system are well explained.

What is missing in this book? The book is weak when it comes to other very important issues as line lay-out, the importance of cell implementation, load leveling (heijunka), line-balancing (vs. takt-time) etc. The book "Pull Production for the Shopfloor" from the Productivity Press Development Team is very easy to read and provides many information and simple drawings about the missing knowledge. Furthermore the book presents calculations about the influence of reducing lot size (set-up time), reducing unplanned machine downtime and the influence of scrap/rework. If you are really interested in understanding the bad influence of large lot size, machine unavailability and scrap/rework you need to take a deeper look into Operations Management, as provided by Quick-Response-Manufacturing, Factory Physics or other usefull books..

This book will do an excellent job combined with other books that cover the missing points. Adopting this production system requires more than sizing a system, you need to change the mindset of your workforce for relentless persuit of continuous improvement (Kaizen) and some understanding about the tools used together with this system: 5S, TPM, SMED, ZQC etc. Furthermore for complex manufacturing systems the question where to start with Pull-implementation of a single line becomes crucial. Sometimes you do not need even to turn your whole processes to pull and a mix of push-pull lines and pull lines might be a better approach for your needs. For people interested in making a splash and where Pull-systems do not seem to be the right approach, I strongly recommend to read Quick-Response-Manufacturing. This approach has many insights in common with JIT/Lean but is much easier to apply. The knowledge from operations management itself will even help to understand pull-systems and what they are based uppon.

Enjoy reading,

Oliver

We have listened to the comments offered by our readers and updated the companion workbook. The forms and documentation files have been recreated in Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats for use in planning and implementing your kanban.

If you purchase the book and would like the workbook file, please send me an email at 'jgross5050@yahoo.com' so that I can send you this new and improved workbook.

Our offer is also available to those who have previously purchased the book.

Thank you for your time.

John Gross
Author