I don’t know about you, but every now and then I like to bring a sandwich to work, called a Jause in the Viennese dialect. I prepare them in the morning at home before I head off. Since I only have a small inventory of bread (a loaf), sooner or later I will use it up and eventually need to buy more. Now let’s imagine the local grocery store has an offer on:
“Half a ton, half the price! Buy 500kg of bread now for a 50% discount!”
Would you do it? No.
Obviously not, aside from the fact that it’s an insane amount of bread, it really doesn’t have a very long shelf life, it would start to mold, and your love affair with bread would soon end. So when is the right time to buy more bread?
We buy bread when we need it, in the amount we need, and try to keep our inventory low…but more on that later.
The reason I’m talking about bread is because it’s something that almost everyone understands, and should make explaining Kanban that little bit easier.
Plus I really like bread.
This is not intended as a lecture or to give you a creepily in-depth knowledge of Kanban and the history behind it. I am not a teacher in that sense, and while it might be cool to know that “Kanban means card and has something to do with Toyota and a guy named Taiichi Ohno, etc.” …, I’d rather use this post to actually examine why we should care about Kanban at all.
So in this blog post, we will visit a bakery. As it is also the Introduction to Kanban, we will look at means to visualize the flow of work, find ways to tell the other process steps to “do more”, and discover a little something called “work in progress”, all while eating donuts!