Robert D In Tulsa That’s a great insight. In our particular situation we are early in our transition to cutting drawers by hand. In the past we cut them on the cnc. In order to gain capacity we started doing it this way. We decided to add a touch of inventory (precut rips) to even out the flow. Basically we needed a little flex in our drawer schedule and we needed a little flex on our cnc. We are right at capacity on our cnc so by doing the kanban we have a little time buffer built in so we don’t have to interrupt their current job. I am sure that our next rev will lower the water even farther in this area and get it even tighter. With this rev we cut the inventory in half! Thanks for the great comment!
Cut the excess inventory in half? Good damn job, to all! Challenge....that isn't good enough...why? Because it's never good enough. Cut that inventory...by any appreciable amount, say at least - 10% / per week. No more inventory. No more excess carts. No more waiting. Orders filled / completed same day...perhaps half day.
Robert D In Tulsa that’s exactly right. I’m a big fan of lowering the water to expose the rocks. We are cutting our lead time every week. I hope in a year to have production time down to a week or less. Then cut more from there! Good stuff, I love lean and now that it’s taking hold in the shop sky’s the limit!
Greg Fasolt Great either. We currently do hand write the majority of our Kanban cards. However there are some we type out and print. For us we like to focus on getting Kanban implemented as quickly as possible. So generally speaking we will use the cards for a month or so and then if we know it’s going to become permanent will go back and make nicer versions of the card. At first we are just purely worried about speed of implementation. After that we can get all the pretty stuff for later. Hopefully that answers your question thanks for asking!
Wouldn't cutting wood to order immediately prior to its need eliminate the need for any cut wood inventory as well as its related Kanban?
Robert D In Tulsa That’s a great insight. In our particular situation we are early in our transition to cutting drawers by hand. In the past we cut them on the cnc. In order to gain capacity we started doing it this way. We decided to add a touch of inventory (precut rips) to even out the flow. Basically we needed a little flex in our drawer schedule and we needed a little flex on our cnc. We are right at capacity on our cnc so by doing the kanban we have a little time buffer built in so we don’t have to interrupt their current job. I am sure that our next rev will lower the water even farther in this area and get it even tighter. With this rev we cut the inventory in half! Thanks for the great comment!
Cut the excess inventory in half?
Good damn job, to all!
Challenge....that isn't good enough...why? Because it's never good enough.
Cut that inventory...by any appreciable amount, say at least - 10% / per week.
No more inventory.
No more excess carts.
No more waiting.
Orders filled / completed same day...perhaps half day.
Robert D In Tulsa that’s exactly right. I’m a big fan of lowering the water to expose the rocks. We are cutting our lead time every week. I hope in a year to have production time down to a week or less. Then cut more from there! Good stuff, I love lean and now that it’s taking hold in the shop sky’s the limit!
Your Kanban cards appear to be hand written. Why is this? Do you have plans to automate this?
Greg Fasolt Great either. We currently do hand write the majority of our Kanban cards. However there are some we type out and print. For us we like to focus on getting Kanban implemented as quickly as possible. So generally speaking we will use the cards for a month or so and then if we know it’s going to become permanent will go back and make nicer versions of the card. At first we are just purely worried about speed of implementation. After that we can get all the pretty stuff for later. Hopefully that answers your question thanks for asking!