Kanban System

A kanban system is a visual scheduling method for lean manufacturing that uses cards or signals, kanban being Japanese for signboard, to trigger the movement, production or supply of material only when it is actually needed downstream, rather than pushing material forward on a fixed schedule. The Japanese industrial engineer Taiichi Ohno developed the system at Toyota Motor Corporation from the late 1940s into the 1950s, inspired by the restocking practice he observed in American supermarkets, where shelves were replenished only as customers actually emptied them. Kanban became a core mechanism of the Toyota Production System, limiting work in progress and exposing problems in the flow of production rather than hiding them behind excess inventory, and the same pull-based signaling principle was later adapted outside manufacturing into software development and general project management.