Varying Sizes of Plastic Pallets

This may sound stupid at first, but if you put it in practice, you'll soon see it works. When you have a 2 bin system, you can't rely on the man to work the system without you doing something to "force" him. You can scream and holler, but he'll still work from both bins until both are empty and then he'll scream for more parts and claim your Kanban doesn't work.

So, how to fix this? Make it tuff to get to the second bin unless he either turns in the first card or trips the system in some way in order to get to the second bin. With the large parts that only fit on pallets, place one pallet at the point of use (pou) and the second either somewhere else on the line where there is space or outside. When the man need the second pallet he is forced to call for a fork truck, and then it's up to the fork truck driver to turn in the kanban card BEFORE he brings the next pallet to the pou.

I've tried the first method, of standing next to the man and screaming at him for not turning in his cards, and in the end I lost my voice and the kanban cards were still attached to the empty bins. When I made the bin itself the card, that is he had to remove the bin and place it in the aisle where a material tech could see and refill it, did the system truly start to work.

Good luck.

Good Morning -

during the leaning of our manufacturing floor, we had some good success with thinking about stacking totes or pallets up (with small quantities) on TOP of each other. If you want to stay visual - mark the outside of the bin with a 'height gage - as long as the bin/area is filled into the green (highest) zone, all is ok, yellow - prepare to acquire supplies or fill the shipping bin, red - supplies/product should be arriving - this could work for racks, stacks of pallets, boxes etc - height should be predicated on replenishment time - etc.

good luck

Eager,

I've never heard of that before, but I like it... real good idea. I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to use that...

glad to be of help. In optimizing processes - it is often the case that the more unusual solution turns out to be the one that people might actually use which is of course the biggest struggle item. Enjoy

For the parts too heavy or too large for totes, use pallets as the Kanban container (that way no-one is ever handling packs that are too awkward or heavy for manual handling)

Determine your "quantity per pallet" to be 50% of your kanban max level if that will fit easily onto one pallet and you then have a "two tag" system. The pallets can be modified to fixture the correct quantity of pieces. This also stops the supplier section from overproduction.

When the system response time can cope with smaller quantities, it's simply a matter of reducing the quantity per pallet.

For larger parts, create a tag for each piece, but make the attachment so that it must be removed for the "user" section to perform their process. (Like linked through a shaft hole or attachment point) This may mean you have more than 2 tags, but the operators will be obliged to "post" the tags as they start to use each item.

great thoughts as well -

Jim