Kanban, waste measurement, and 5S: a reading guide.
These notes summarise three topics we cover on the second day of the intensive. They are written to explain the reasoning behind different approaches rather than to argue for one method over another.
Why Kanban boards work on a factory floor without software
Digital Kanban tools exist and work well in offices where everyone sits at a screen most of the day. A factory floor is a different environment. Operators move between stations, hands are often occupied or gloved, and a shared tablet mounted near a machine tends to get dusty, dropped, or ignored after the first week.
A physical board sidesteps all of that. Cards, colored tags, or marked bins communicate status at a glance, from a distance, without anyone opening an app. The trade-off is that a physical system cannot generate automatic reports or send alerts to a manager's phone. For companies in the twenty to one hundred employee range, that trade-off is often acceptable, because the person who needs the information is usually standing on the floor already, not reviewing a dashboard from an office upstairs.
Where a physical system does need care is in sizing. Too many cards in circulation and the board stops signaling anything useful. Too few and stations stall waiting for a card to free up. Getting this number right typically takes a short calibration period after the initial setup, adjusted against real order volume rather than theoretical capacity.
Measuring the material waste nobody currently tracks
Ask most production managers what percentage of raw material becomes scrap, and the honest answer is often a guess. Purchasing records show what came in. Shipping records show what went out. The difference sits somewhere in between, distributed across offcuts, setup waste, rework, and material that was simply damaged in handling, and almost nobody separates those categories.
There are a few reasonable ways to start closing that gap. One approach is weighing scrap bins at set intervals and logging the weight against the batch that produced it. Another is tracking rework units as a separate count from first-pass good units, rather than folding them into total output. A third option some facilities use is a simple tally sheet at the point where offcuts get generated, filled in by the operator rather than reconstructed later from memory.
Each method has a cost in staff time and a different level of precision. Weighing bins is quick but does not distinguish between waste causes. Point-of-origin tally sheets are more precise but depend on consistent operator participation. Choosing between them usually comes down to which category of waste the facility suspects is largest, and how much staff time can reasonably be spared to log it.
What 5S means in practice, and why month two is where it often stalls
5S breaks down into five stages: sort, set in order, shine, standardize, sustain. In Czech shops the five words are sometimes translated directly, sometimes kept in the original Japanese with local explanations attached. Either way, the first three stages, sorting out what is not needed, arranging what remains, and cleaning the area, tend to go smoothly. They are visible, satisfying, and finish within days.
The pattern that shows up repeatedly across different facilities is that the fourth and fifth stages are where things quietly stop. Standardizing means writing down the agreed layout so it can be checked against, and sustaining means actually checking it on a schedule, usually weekly, with a named person responsible. Without that ownership, tools drift back to wherever is convenient in the moment, labels fade, and by the second month the shadow board looks close to how it did before the exercise started.
This is not a criticism of the teams involved. It is usually a structural gap: nobody was assigned the audit, or the audit was assigned to someone already at capacity with other responsibilities. The workshop spends comparable time on the audit routine as on the initial sort, specifically because that is the stage most likely to determine whether the exercise holds after a few months.
Reading order, if you want one
The three topics above are not strictly sequential, but they build on each other in a useful order if you are new to the subject.
Start with the workflow map
See The First Article for the whiteboard method that identifies where a Kanban system should be anchored.
Then size the Kanban board
Understanding the bottleneck first makes the card count and board layout a much smaller guessing exercise.
Layer in waste measurement
Once flow is visible, it becomes easier to see where material is disappearing between stations.
Finish with 5S sustain planning
Organizing the workspace matters most once a repeatable flow exists to protect.
Want to see how these fit your production line?
These notes are general by design, since every facility has a different layout and different constraints. A direct conversation is the fastest way to see which parts apply.
Details on eligibility and format follow on the next page.