Small to medium sized businesses in particular have realised that Kanban Management; through utilisation of the Kanban Board, is beneficial to production processes which contain only a small number of variants. However, providing the correct tools are used it is also beneficial to the productivity and efficiency of production processes which contain a larger number of variants.

The Kanban Board provides both the planning staff and the employees with the possibility of obtaining a comprehensive overview of requirements and inventory stocks, thus facilitates management of the work processes without regular intervention. The Kanban Board is assembled according to the specific company Kanban requirements. However, the principle function is always the same. The Kanban cards are inserted into into the Kanban Board pockets; arranged by line or column. The Individual Kanban card pockets can be colour coded to requirement to produce a more decisive visible overview, or can simply be a uniform colour.

Utilising the traffic signal Kanban Board assembly (Fig 1), the Kanban cards are initially sorted into the green pockets. The first Kanban card to reach the yellow zone signals that the predefined lot size has been reached, hence indicates that production can be started to replenish the buffer inventory. A Kanban card that reaches the red zone indicates that productions needs to commence immediately to ensure no product deficiency develops.