The History Of Kanban
This post was written by an AI and lightly edited by a human.
Kanban, which means “visual signal” in Japanese, is used to communicate clearly when action is required.
Kanban was developed by a Toyota engineer in 1940 to eliminate bottlenecks in the manufacturing processes. [Sources: 5, 6] It was originally modeled on a system that monitors a supermarket’s stock levels, matches consumer buying patterns, and stores, at a low level. In other words, the factory was stockpiling at levels consistent with actual consumption. This was done to reduce excess inventory and was called just-in-time inventory (JIT). [Sources: 6, 8]
The system aimed to improve not only the quality of the product, but also the efficiency of its production. It also helped to remove obstacles and keep the lines clear by standardizing and refining the manufacturing process. [Sources: 1, 9]
These days, Kanban turns up in many applications. You can find it in Trello, Airtable, and others. It helps you visualize your work, maximize efficiency, and be agile.
Behind the Scenes
This article was created by entering the phrase “history of Kanban” in an app called AI-Writer. After a few minutes, the app generated an article and showed me all the citations it used. You can also use it to generate all the citations without writing an article at all.
On the plus side, you get an article. On the minus side, you get an article with a lot of repetition, questionable punctuation, and no flow. It does a decent job of compiling all the sources it finds and stringing them together into something approximating human speech. It gives you a percentage approximation of how original the sentences are. Basically, it’s remixing existing sources. Plagiarism could be a risk. (That’s why this is just a demonstration. I haven’t and wouldn’t use this to write a blog.) Also, there’s no way you would believe this was written by a human.
I’m going to keep my day job.
Machine writing is not some crazy bleeding edge thing. The Associated Press is already using AI in multiple in many parts of its news-gathering activities, from research, to distribution, to some actual writing. Here’s some reporting on using AI’s for financial reporting from The Verge from way back in 2015. Robot novelists are also in development. But I don’t see them catching up with humans anytime soon.
Sources:
[0]: https://kanbanize.com/kanban-resources/getting-started/what-is-kanban
[1]: https://productivityland.com/what-is-kanban-board/
[2]: https://zenkit.com/en/blog/kanban-explained-what-youve-always-wanted-to-know/
[3]: https://blog.runrun.it/en/kanban-system/
[4]: https://www.workfront.com/project-management/methodologies/kanban
[5]: https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/10/what-is-kanban-and-how-can-it-benefit-your-business.html
[6]: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/kanban-the-benefits-of-using-this-agile-pm-framework/
[7]: https://getnave.com/blog/kanban-history/
[8]: https://www.projectmanager.com/kanban
[9]: http://apppm.man.dtu.dk/index.php/Kanban_in_Project_Management
[10]: https://www.projectengineer.net/how-to-use-kanban-to-improve-projects/
