Reading the kanban board and loops
Manufacturing → Kanban. What the board and the loops show, and how the hours and minutes are rounded.
Manufacturing → Kanban → Kanban Board shows each loop’s cards as they move between full, empty and in replenishment. Kanban Loops lists the loops themselves with their signals.
- The board’s text is readable for every user, whatever look or theme they have chosen.
- Oldest signal (h) on Kanban Loops is shown to one decimal place — 3.5 hours rather than a long run of digits — so the loop waiting longest is easy to spot.
- Elsewhere in Manufacturing, a machine’s minutes in each state and an operation’s estimated and actual hours are rounded the same way.
Which loop needs someone now
Kanban Loops starts with a Needs attention column, giving the worst reason first:
| It says | What it means |
|---|---|
| Signal overdue | An empty card has waited longer than the loop’s Alert after hours (or its target cycle). |
| No full container | Nothing full is left at the point of use: the line is about to run short. |
| Cards blocked | Some of the loop’s cards are blocked. |
| Cards not all issued | Fewer cards are in circulation than the loop’s card count. |
| On track | None of these. A loop that is not active shows nothing. |
Signal overdue and No full container are shown in red, the others in amber. The Full, Signaling and Oldest signal (h) figures are coloured the same way when they are the cause.
A column heading with ⓘ after it explains itself: rest the pointer on the heading — Container, Cards, Max stock, Full, Signaling, Oldest signal (h) or Needs attention — to read what the figure means. Max stock, for example, is Container × Cards: the most the loop can ever hold.