Kanban Use Cases

Case #1:

High volume parallel production lines with mono-lot requirements for each raw material.

A Manufacturer has several parallel production lines and is running a high volume of smaller jobs. This manufacturers process does NOT allow mixing of raw material lots within a single job for traceability purposes.

They wish that they could achieve traceability without manually maintaining a whiteboard of part numbers and lot numbers to ensure only a single lot number of each part is issued to the floor at a time and to mitigate traceability risks during restocking the production lines.

Traceability Architecture Configuration:
Configure Kanban Levels for the raw materials on each line and configure the “Only 1 batch” setting to be ON.

This prevents mixing lots of raw materials on each line, by only allowing replenishment of the existing lot number – until a formal lot change process occurs and that line changes over to the new lot number.

This approach will leverage the bulk replenishment functionality, speed up replenishment, and ensure mono lot traceability – without the need of manually maintaining a white board or incurring the inefficiency of waiting for every line to part out of a given lot number before changing over to the new raw material lot across all lines.

The inventory transactions for high volume transactions are automated by merely scanning the production line that was used and DataNinja will leverage the Kanban configuration to automatically record the utilized materials for that job.

Case #2:

Low volume or jobs on HUGE production lines keep the production line feed with materials.

A manufacturer has a large production line and requires replenishment several times a shift to keep the line running. This manufacturers process does allow multiple raw material lots for a given raw material, HOWEVER all lots used need to be recorded for traceability purposes. This manufacturer has some materials that are NOT lot tracked (part number only traceability components that also need to be recorded).

Traceability Architecture Configuration:
Configure Kanban levels for the materials used on the line, and configure the “Only 1 batch” setting to be OFF. Use traditional inventory transfers to bulk transfer materials to floor stock whenever a material gets low. DataNinja fully supports all tracking types (batch tracking, sublot tracking, part only tracking, and serial tracking).

Case #3:

Biotech or Food Manufacturer that has a serial process repeated 5 times then combined together for a single lot definition.

A manufacturer has a bioreactor that is 1000L and requires 5 distinct sets of reactions performed in series that are all merged into the holding tank. Manufacture allows for mixing of raw material lots but requires all lots used to be recorded for traceability purposes. The trouble is that each reactor run requires 20 raw materials and it is time consuming to scan each raw material every time.

Traceability Architecture Configuration:
Option 1: Because the 5 distinct reactor runs are combined, the bill of materials could be amended to have a five step process in a single scheduled bill of materials under a single lot number that is five times larger. Under this approach, each raw material would only need to be scanned once, reducing the number of scans from 100 to only 20. No eKanban needed or used.
Option 2: Keep each reactor run as separate instances, but use eKanban to streamline the number of scans to consume raw materials down from 100 to just 5 (one per bioreactor run), by using eKanban auto issue, and scanning the bioreactor itself to consume the required raw material lot numbers and quantities.