Kiddie Kanban

No! I don't track the kids' chores with a kanban board or anything like that.

But I did just learn a bit more about the origins of kanban from a post (and comments) about a clever way an office manager gets help keeping inventory for a staff kitchen.

In addition to learning that I was doing my own version of the same thing, the post gave me a good way to improve on it.

In "Milk Kanban," Pawel Brodzinski describes the system:

A simple index card [is] taped to the last milk carton in a row stating, "Bring me to Kasia." That's it.

In the context, it really says that:

• we're running out of (specific kind of) milk
• we want to restock soon
• there's enough time to make an order (we don't drink that much of cappuccinos and macchiatos)

But it's just a visual signal. Kanban at its very core.

Spurred by a sarcastic comment, several readers left interesting comments of their own, including a couple regarding the origin of the task management system:

[A] major problem affecting Japanese manufacturing, was factories full of WIP[. B]ecause I just made a subassembly, I have nothing else to do, the parts are right here, I might as well make another of the same subassembly to get ahead of the work. Taiichi Ohno visited the US and saw how a supermarket works and thought, "that's what I want my factories to be, there are 10 lemons, if you grab five to make lemonade and you grab a sugar bag from over there, someone notices that the lemon pile is too low and grabs more from storage, someone else restocks the sugar bags." (This is a bit of an oversimplification, if memory serves me right he was using the supermarket metaphor before he went to Toyota and before he visited the US.)

To do this in a manufacturing plant, he had everything in the middle put into a plastic tub or on a rolling skid or so, and on the side of the tub was a reorder form, if you use the part in the tub you have to send the card back to reorder another of those parts to be made. Then management can make sure that there is exactly the amount of Subassembly B1a6 by controlling the cards that are there, and if that doesn't work you figure out what the upstream team needs.

And those little durable reorder forms were on card stock for durability and were called ... kanban.

Commenter C.R. Drost's further thoughts on the task tracking system are worth noting, too.

But back to inventory management... My system is clever, but not that clever.

Over the years, I have trained my wife and kids to help me maintain a sane level of supplies by placing the empty container on the kitchen counter when using the last of something. This reminds me to do two things: Rotate the backup container into use (when one exists) and add that item to the grocery list. (It also cuts down on a pet peeve of mine: having empty containers waste space in the trash: After I update the grocery list, I break down the package, if needed.)

I love the idea of expanding on this by affixing notes to things that are harder to keep track of than a quick peek into the pantry, or that I don't (or rarely) use myself. I can just have the note (or the container and the note) placed in the same location I've already established for everything else.

-- CAV