- Constant WIP - CONWIP CONWIP stands for constant work in progress which means that the overall number of work items in the system is limited, not just a single phase or column. For example, with a CONWIP of 6 we can have at most 6 work items between 'todo' and 'done'. Like throughtput, takt time, and flow efficiency CONWIP comes from the car manufacturing world and it was designed for a system that produces the same kind of work item over and over.
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- Aging Work Items In my throughput post I was writing about a piled up inventory of work items which is created when the throughput (output) is lower than the demand (input). These work items are visible, they are on the Kanban board, and we call them aging work items.
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- Throughput When I started to use the Kanban method there were two measures.
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- Using Takt Time to Find Problems Earlier The idea of takt time comes from car manufacturing. It shows the elapsed time between two completely assembled cars leaving the factory floor. If the takt time is 2 hours, it means that the factory produces 12 cars a day (24h/2h = 12). With the use of takt time people in car manufacturing can detect problems in production earlier.
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- Flow Efficiency Last year in the Lean Kanban University conference series I was talking about flow efficiency and how we measured and used it with one of my old teams. My friend Chris McDermott asked me to write a post about it, so here it comes. Like other metrics such as cycle time, takt time, and throughput, flow efficiency comes from car manufacturing.
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