We live in a globalized world were technology plays an important role. Innovation is the key point for the companies who strive to gain more market’s participation. Adapting to the new consumer’s needs and trends increase the firms’ commitment to simplify their products and services also making them more affordable.

Implementing sophisticated managing tools, charts, workflows which lead to a better understanding of the processes is determinant to achieve the companies’ goals nowadays.

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/business-resilience

During our last Logistics class we were discussing about the importance of organization and planification. A new concept was introduced to us and I wanted to highlight it. The Kanbas System.

“Signboard” is the meaning of Kanban in Japanese, word that means a lean managing method useful to improve work. It has it origins back in 1940s., and was inspired by the Toyota production system, and it was automatically implemented by Toyota automotive company which had the main objective of producing all products “Just in time” according to the consumers’ demand.

https://www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75years/text/entering_the_automotive_business/chapter1/section4/item4.html

Kanban basically consists on organizing the workflow in a chart so that it becomes easy for the organization to visualize the progress and process from start to finish.

It can be used for studies, work, personal planning, etc., it is a key mechanism for strategic planning where it can easily illustrate big data simplified in a same chart.

Kanban has specific indicators to measure team capacity and the average project length.

https://www.digite.com/kanban/what-is-kanban/

Team velocity: It determinates how many tasks a team can deliver in certain period of time, Velocity is calculated periodically and to help with accuracy of the calculated velocity, teams aim to create tasks that are similar in size.

Lead and Cycle time: Defines the average time that takes to complete a task from the beginning to the end. The lead time is generally calculated since the team gets a the order from the customer and cycle time is calculated since the team starts working on a task.

Actionable Agile metrics: Use cycle time to better predict when each project item is going to be finished. It was created by Daniel Vacanti, actionable Agile metrics measure how much time it took to finish 50%, 85% and 95% of the tasks.

References:

– Womack, James P. (2007). The Machine That Changed the World.

– Ohno, Taiichi (1988). Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production.