Kanban for Beer

Beer Kanban!

Did you know that simple concept of kanban can be applied to anything?  Here's a funny example of how LSI's past Blackbelt participants have developed a kanban for ordering beer in a bus in Japan.  It was the last day of LSI's Japan Lean Tour program a couple of years back, and they were allowed to have some beer in the bus on the way back from the last plant tour.  Instead of shouting "more beer", they came up with a system of tearing off the beer can's tab and then sending it back to "trigger" the re-ordering process.  Ingenious.



And in case you're wondering if that's LSI staff singing karaoke, not quite.  It was our tour guide who is singing in the background.

For the record, we no longer offer beer or karaoke these days on the bus because it just got too complicated to organize these activities and of course, sometimes people got carried away.  But it was fun while it lasted