The Kanban supply has become increasingly popular in recent years, giving companies and suppliers a simple way to track their current workflow and manage a just-in-time inventory properly. But how would it apply to a market or niche like industrial fastening products, and why is it such a useful tool?
What is Kanban?
Kanban is built around the idea of visualizing work. In its simplest form, Kanban is multiple cards or notes on a board, with different vertical columns for tracking the current stage they are at. This could be something as basic as columns for “planned,” “doing,” and “done,” or something much more complex.
The idea behind this Kanban system gives you a very simple way to tell how different projects, situations, or products are progressing. It also means that entire teams can tell how well things are going with just a glance and can usually update their current status to share it with other teams that might rely on them.
What can Kanban be used for?
A proper supply chain is essential to nearly any business, even if that supply chain only matters for internal use. Often, a finished product or service requires a lot of individual parts coming together, which all have their own suppliers, raw materials, and processes or steps involved in making them.
A Kanban supply chain tracking system, no matter how basic, gives companies a way to identify bottlenecks or areas where one group is being too productive for other teams to catch up. If one team is at the “done” stage while another can’t get out of “planning,” then you can tell that something is wrong with their planning attempts.
Kanban also limits the amount of work being done at the same time, making it easier for the entire group to focus. For example, if a team has taken on six different projects and each project has its own card or note, visualizing them in this way can make the issue a lot easier to understand.
How would Kanban help with industrial fastening products?
Industrial fastening products like bolts, screws, cable ties, rivets, and other fasteners are incredibly important. They can be the core part of keeping any complex machine held together, and not having a stable, accessible supply often bottlenecks entire projects or company stock levels.
However, since many items fall under the “fasteners” label, this also makes it hard to track them all. There might be dozens of screw types in a company’s production line, for example. With a system like Kanban, supply chain issues can be monitored, identified, and fixed based on the ‘stage’ that is causing the problem.
If you can’t get batches of 65mm stainless steel screws to your production line, then there is clearly something wrong in the supply chain, but Kanban identifies the point in the supply chain where the delays or shortages are actually happening.
Is that all Kanban is for?
Kanban is occasionally said to be a great way for companies to slowly improve their supply chains. By identifying areas that cause problems, they can be fixed or eliminated. The more granular a Kanban supply chain tracking board is, the faster you can figure out where the problems are beginning and ending.
Kanban is not just for supply issues. Even outside of a production line, having an accessible digital log that tracks each major piece of a business’s operations can be a blessing to the average employee. Not only can they see what is most important right now, but they can work out which projects might need the most support or observation.
Kanban outside of supply chains
On top of that, Kanban is quite a modular system to use. You can add as many columns as you like, set up tallies to see how many times a certain process has been completed in a week, or even turn it into a personal system for individual employees to update as they manage their own work.
At its core, the Kanban system is simply a way of putting your priorities and status into a visual form. This means that it can be modified to suit nearly any situation that calls for proper tracking of an ongoing project, even if that means using it to track your own responsibilities for the day.