Comments on: The Fifth Primary Practice of Kanban

By: Lean and Kanban Collection : Software & Technology @kirkk.com

Lean and Kanban Collection : Software & Technology @kirkk.com — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 14:49:29 +0000

[...] that examines Kanban’s primary practices. Also check out his follow-up post where he adds The Fifth Primary Practice of Kanban. And his posts on Kanban, Flow, and Cadence and XP as a Kanban System are great, as [...]

By: Michael Dubakov

Michael Dubakov — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:55:42 +0000

C’mon, if we follow this road, we may add “energized work” and other common sense agile values. Kanban should be kept as lean as possible

By: Toby Champion

Toby Champion — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 07:56:48 +0000

The publisher’s page for Learning to See (Rother and Shook) is here, and lists related resources:

http://www.lean.org/Bookstore/ProductDetails.cfm?SelectedProductID=9

By: Corey Ladas

Corey Ladas — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 03:12:33 +0000

Probably some of both, depending on where the improvement opportunities were. The more trained people you have, the easier it should be to find people to perform multiskill operations. It could be that all of the new workers were applied to new flow processes that reduced both cycle time and kanban.

By: Karl Scotland

Karl Scotland — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:35:35 +0000

Nice quote. So did Toyota achieve that improvement by reducing kanban, or improving throughput with the same kanban?

By: Corey Ladas

Corey Ladas — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:11:27 +0000

Corollas were fairly popular and selling well. We started with a plan to make 5000 cars. I instructed the head of the engine section to make 5000 units and use under 100 workers. After two or three months, he reported, “We can make 5000 units with 80 workers.”

After that, the Corolla kept selling well. So I asked him, “How many workers can make 10000 units?”

He instantly answered, “160 workers.”

So I yelled at him, “In grade school I was taught that two times eight equals sixteen. After all these years, do you think I should learn that from you? Do you think I’m a fool?”

Before long, 100 workers were making over 10000 units.

–Taiichi Ohno

By: Corey Ladas

Corey Ladas — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:44:52 +0000

I like hybrids where there are pooled segments chained together e.g. fuzzy-front-end -> engineering -> operations.

By: Karl Scotland

Karl Scotland — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:55:00 +0000

Thanks Corey.
That sounds like moving to more of a CONWIP system?
Karl

By: Karl Scotland

Karl Scotland — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:33:15 +0000

Hi David,

That is going to be my next blog post I needed to get this one out first though! Watch this space…

Karl

By: David Draper

David Draper — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:50:33 +0000

Go on Karl, after recent discussions how about:
0. Respect those doing the work

It can’t hurt and may just help readers remember where all this comes from.

I truly believe that this is a deeply held belief in the existing Kanban community, we need to work to ensure that as popularity increases we don’t loose this in favour of tools, limits and index cards.

Cheers

Dave.