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Flexible To Use The Kanban Approach Is Flexible To Use And Can Be ...


Flexible to use The Kanban approach is flexible to use and can be implemented using a range of IT tools including high level databases as argued by Jit Rikhye Indar (2002). This is apparently because of the fact that the Kanban is interest in the inventory management side of the overall manufacturing process and not the entire product production management. Hence the Kanban can take a desired form that can communicate to the line managers effectively right from the traditional rectangular piece of paper with moving dots under a cellophane sheet or a formal Gantt chart produced using Microsoft Projects application with detailed milestones on the product delivery, stage completion and their dependencies.
From the aforementioned arguments it is clear that Kanban in a JIT environment facilitates the structured inventory management process within the organization in a method that can be appreciated by the line manager in-charge of the day-to-day activities on the shop floor. This further makes it clear that the Kanban approach can be customised and structured to the requirements of the manufacturing granularity of an organization's requirements thus capturing the inventory required for the completion of a manufacturing stage.
It is also clear that the efficiency in the usage of the Kanban approach is independent of the kind of tool used for the purpose as the information requirements for the Kanban process is purely for the given manufacturing stage which is decided on the real-time demands in the target market. The pull strategy of the Kanban justifies the aforementioned.
S. Shanker and S.K. Mukhopadhyay (2005) say that the use of Kanban in a given manufacturing environment can be effectively customised not only by tailoring the pull strategy and the approach to reflect the production process but mainly to increase the flexibility through the continuous improvement of the production process. This can be achieved by the structured inventory control approach where an organization can use its resources effectively to manage the supply chain as well as continuously revise the purchasing strategy depending upon the market situations so that the production process will not be hindered and the residual costs are also lowered.
The application of the 5S approach to perform the housekeeping in an organization's inventory to identify the flaws and provide visibility to the overall supply chain process as argued by S. Shanker and S.K. Mukhopadhyay (2005) is a classical example where the customisation of the Kanban is evident. Although the 5S is a key feature of the Kanban methodology, a detailed discussion is beyond the scope of this report.


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