Kanban Made Simple: Demystifying and Applying Toyota's Legendary Manufacturing Process

Rating:
Summary: Good BUT
Review: Book is well organized. Chapters 3 (Data Collection) and 4 (Sizing the Kanban)need more detail. Overall, the book does take you through the process. CD is a waste of time. All the files are in PDF format. If these were in Word or Excel, it would be much easier to use.

Rating:
Summary: Great Implementation Book
Review: Kanban Made Simple is a great book to help in teaching people how to implement Kanbans. While many people conceptually understand Kanban, they do not understand all the elements that go into sizing the kanban and into the design of the kanban. This book addresses all these elements (sizing, type, visual management, rollout, and batch size reduction)in a step by step method. I recommend it to all my clients.

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: Visit any healthy manufacturing operation and you'll see a buzz of bewildering activity - parts being moved on overhead cranes, raw materials being wheeled in, line operators checking their production schedules before they change the line over to their next product. Those production schedules, as this book suggests, can really be a hindrance. Operators become dependent on them, although the schedules may not accurately reflect customer demand. The solution? Kanban, which is based on having a communication system right on the factory floor that communicates key indications of customer behavior - buying, ordering, canceling - directly to the workers themselves. Production activity, therefore, is actually scheduled based on customer demand rather than on past expectations, with the advantage that you hold less inventory and operate more effectively. This book (which comes with a compact disc of implementation directions) gives clear insight into this powerful scheduling system employed efficiently by Toyota and other world-class companies. We highly recommend it to executives, managers and supervisors of companies that earn their living by making widgets more successfully.