Kanban in 30 Days by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Packt Publishing

The interesting result is shown in the following table:

Changing limit

Difference in throughput

Difference in time to market

100 to 5

-31%

-70%

100 to 8

-19%

-59%

100 to 13

-12%

-48%

100 to 20

-5%

-34%

This means that if you set the limit to 20, you lose only 5 percent on throughput, but you will be done in much less time. If time to market is really important for you, you can set the limit to 5 and be done much quicker.

What limit should you start with?

It's now time to decide which limit to begin with. Without running for a time, it's very hard to predict what would be the best balance between throughput and lead-time. Your first decision is about how important quick time to market is for you. If it is very important, we suggest you start with tough (low) limits. In practice, that means that the normal is that people are waiting for work instead of work waiting for people to take care of it. In other words, you want the next work station/process step to be ready to start working when you are ready with your part of the work.

If time to market is not very important, you can start with wider limits and allow some buffers to build up between process steps just to make sure everybody almost always has something to do.

The reasons for having queues between process steps is to have a buffer to handle variation caused either by different work capacity, like in the match game previously, or different amounts of work.

A good flow is created by slack, that is, the time when some people actually have nothing to do. This time could be used to improve their own way of working or helping others who at the moment have more to do.

Limits do not need to be digital, either it's one or it's zero, in the way that as long as you are under the limit, it's fine to add more work until we reach the limit and then absolutely nothing more. Instead, we suggest you have the last available queue places saved for extreme cases. This gives pressure to have the smallest possible limits but be able to handle cases of extreme variation. In the following example, there is a hard limit of 4 but a soft limit of 3:

A Kanban board with a hard limit of 4 and a soft limit of 3

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