Hello,
We don’t currently use Kanbans but are looking into implementing them. From what I understand, a Kanban job automatically completes the operations, issues materials, and closes the job.
My assumption is that the intent behind Kanban jobs is not to use printed job travelers, is that correct?
For those who currently use Kanban, do you still print travelers for your operators? Our team currently relies on printed travelers, and I’m trying to understand how we could incorporate Kanban into our system today (we currently do not use work queue, have been told its broken in our E10 environment).
From what I understand, a Kanban job automatically completes the operations, issues materials, and closes the job.
Yup.
My assumption is that the intent behind Kanban jobs is not to use printed job travelers, is that correct?
The idea is that it’s faster to report repetitive stuff on kanban jobs rather than using “normal” jobs. Your operator just enters the total quantities completed/scrapped and hits save and you’re done. All one screen and you can report the production in a minute or two. It’s perfect for repetitive production where widgets are advanced between part numbers in a timely manner and you’re okay with tracking labor at a broader level. It’s not good for custom production, jobs where stuff is going to be partially complete for a long time, or jobs where you’re trying to track the labor down to the second.
You could continue to use paper travelers and just add an operation called “kanban receipt” or something where the last operator enters the kanban job number once he/she is done with the final operation and reports it to Epicor. That should help to minimize the risk of double reporting or failing to report production.
Just like normal jobs, you can re-open it after the fact and tweak things.
A typical use case that I’ve seen for Kanban jobs goes like this. Production supervisor tells one of his operators to build some quantity of some part number in free time he has during the day. At the end of the day, the operator gives the supervisor back the finished parts, the supervisor then creates the kanban job and everything is finished.
if these are “standard” parts, he would have a “generic” traveler that would have all the materials and operations he would need to do, so it’s easy to finish and he can just do it in open time between other things they’re doing.
I’m sure there are other use cases, but this is the most common one I run into.