You are the manager for a Pizza restaurant.  Currently, your restaurant pre-makes pizzas that are ordered the most to increase the number of pizzas being made on time for your customers.  Over time, many customers have complained that their pizzas were cold upon delivery and not fresh, requesting refunds or remakes of their pizza.  Your location is losing money from these wasteful practices, therefore, you want to create a Kanban based on the following basic principles:

1.       A later process tells an earlier process when new items are required.  This means that unless a customer orders a pizza, no pizzas will be made.  Pull!

2.       The earlier process produces what the later process needs.

3.       No Items can be made without a Kanban card (order request).  This allows the process to be transparent so everyone knows what is going on.

4.       Defects are not passed on to the next stage.

Create a Kanban board for your pizza company that delivers.  You must have 4-6 columns with headings for each.  Decide what your Kanban cards will represent.  Set Rules for your Kanban.  Examples; criteria to move between columns? How to flag issues?

A few strategies for success

1.       Normalize the size of incoming work by breaking up big orders into smaller ones.

2.       Set each Kanban card to represent 1 pizza as opposed to 1 order.  For example, one order may represent 2 large pizzas for one family or 20 large pizzas for a party.

3.       Support multiple types of Kanban.  For example a Red Kanban can represent a type of pizza or perhaps a size of pizza.