Instant Feedback – Visualizing the Flow of Work
When you think about making a sandwich, it’s generally “make sandwich” and that’s where it ends. But there are more steps involved, so I’ve broken down the process a little bit to help show what process steps are:
Buy bread → Cut bread → Assemble sandwich → Eat sandwich.
Now I know that “Assemble sandwich” is a bit generic – that’s there because I need variety in my life, and make different sandwiches of different complexity.
Anyway, if we break the above flow down a little we actually have:
- resource management (use bread, buy bread, …)
- product creation (format bread, then fill bread)
- shipping (since I carry it to work)
It’s OK to judge my sandwiching. I’m German and confident in my efficiency, but the above won’t help you with understanding the value of Kanban because it’s too simple.
So we’re going to look a little further upstream at the bread manufacturing itself, which is where my supplier (the bakery) has to go through a similar process. They need to make sure they have the ingredients, then create their product, and eventually ship them.
In order to turn ingredients, time and energy into delicious bread and buns, they also have several process steps because they have a load more variables to try and factor in (order volume, time, machining capacity).
But even though they need to work much more efficiently than me, they also try to keep their inventory low.
The KanBun Bakery
All baking starts by figuring out what you’re going to sell, which can either be driven by customer orders (i.e. whole sale) or by what you know you can sell in your store (i.e. direct sales). Either way from the process perspective, “we need X” is actually an order, and first thing that happens is that the order is accepted. From there they look at what’s in progress and when the order needs to be completed, and then the bakery magic can begin. When it’s done – it’s finally packaged and shipped out.
Kanban looks at the flow of the order in a perspective that starts with the backlog (order accepted), to pre-flight (mix dough), then in progress (baking), and then completion (deliver to customer).
So we’re already off to a good start because we know what all the main stages are that happen from the request coming in to the freshly baked goodness going out!
Let’s spice it up, we will now visualize this chain. By creating a column for each process step you have actually created a Kanban board, and it would look like the illustration below. If you’re interested in “what’s beyond visualization”, check this blog post.
Kanban is about visualizing the process and the flow of work.
So far so good, but couldn’t we just do that by ourselves with a pen and paper? Good question, let’s add to our example.
Since the bakery’s products are so delicious, they quickly became the talk of the town (I was about to write “went viral”, but doesn’t sound too good when talking about edibles, doesn’t it!?). The demand went through the roof, so instead of being able to take care of the orders pretty much as they arrived, Betty the Baker started writing the orders down on Kanban cards to keep track of them.
She even used different card colors to indicate the relative priority of the orders (note that for the sake of simplicity, all orders have an equal number of items, require the same effort and are equally complex to make).
Now she has a backlog which gives an easy overview of what’s going on. This is our Commitment. It’s the same as when we make a ‘to do list’, but there we’d need filters do achieve this quick overview:
Kanban is also about visualizing the amount of work per workflow status.