How is Kanban used at SOLABS?

What is Kanban

Kanban is a visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. Kanban visualizes both the process (the workflow) and the actual work passing through that process. The goal of Kanban is to identify potential bottlenecks in your process and fix them so work can flow through them cost-effectively and at an optimal speed or throughput.

Use cases

While the methodology was invented by Taiichi Ohno, an engineer at Toyota, for the automobile industry, it can be applied to a broad scope of industries.

Kanban at SOLABS

SOLABS started implementing the Kanban approach about 2 years ago.  The goal was to have a better visualization of the work performed by the engineering service and the bottlenecks blocking them.

The work has been broken down into different categories, each having its own boards: support intervention, QM APP development, technical interventions & tool development.  Each board column represents one or more step(s) of the underlying workflow used to deliver such a product.  Cards representing a task to be performed populate the boards.  Each card is defined by metadata to help both employees and managers see what needs to be done and how it needs to be done.  As the work progresses, so does the card in the board, getting ever closer to the end of the board.

Future of Kanban at SOLABS

SOLABS will continue to refine its Kanban methodology with its existing implementation and will also convert the few remaining work categories not yet migrated.