Kanban  Manufacturers, Traders, Suppliers

Kanban (yap. "Kan" (see) and "Ban" (map)) was developed by Taiichi Ohno, an employee of the Japanese car manufacturer Toyota, and introduced in 1947 to compensate for a competitive disadvantage compared to American competitors. Kanban's goal is a demand-oriented, low-waste and self-controlling production according to the fet principle (pull control).The idea behind Kanban goes back to the supermarket principle. In a supermarket, customers take goods and employees to fill in the gaps that have arisen. In a Kanban system, this principle is applied to the manufacture of products.A practical example is provided by a company that assembles a product and takes the necessary parts from an intermediate store. As soon as parts are removed from the interim storage, suppliers or upstream departments of the company replenish the interim storage system.A information about the requirements of a downstream department (sink) is transmitted to an upstream department (source) by means of a kanban card. The source produces the required quantity of parts and returns them to the sink. In a kanban system, the information flow from the sink to the supply source and the material flow in the opposite direction. In contrast, production planning systems (PPS) work according to the push control principle. In the meantime, radio frequency identification (RFID) systems are also used instead of the kanban cards, which enable automatic control of the kanban containers used in the kanban system and at the same time permit more flexible sequence planning.