Category: Kanban

ZARA changes its clothing designs every two weeks on average, offering upwards of 11,000 distinct garments every year. In comparison, competitors change their designs every three or four months and product 3-4,000 distinct pieces. This is fast fashion: the business model of replicating high-fashion, luxury-brand pieces quickly and cheaply, making them available to customers while […]

Kanban is a tool used in Lean Manufacturing to visually manage the workflow through your processes. It is based on the concept of a pull system where things are only replaced as they are consumed. 

Does your organization use a pull or push system to allow your manufacturing function to meet your customers’ demand for your products? Let’s learn why a pull system might be a better approach for optimizing your organization.

The strategy of continuously improving your organizational processes by setting your goals, identifying deviations from those goals, and then taking appropriate actions to adjust your processes to close the gaps.

Have you ever had to shut down your manufacturing line because major components haven’t arrived from your supplier? Have you ever had to rent extra warehouses for your finished goods? Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing would prevent that from happening. Let’s see how that works.

When we leave the shop floor and enter the back office, we might think that people’s desks are where they work. We’d be wrong. Their workbench, their tooling, their line … is in their heads. This means that most knowledge work (information technology [IT], legal, management, product design, finance) is invisible. My colleague Tonianne tells […]

Kanban is a Japanese word that translates into “signboard” or “billboard,” and is a tool developed in Lean manufacturing but applied to any process. It is a visual scheduling system that allows a team – for any process – to know what needs to be done, what is being done and what has been done. Kanban can […]