Intuitive workflow management for amazing efficiency with digital Kanban boards
You and your team may have found incredible success with a physical kanban board for some time now. However, the charm of a whiteboard crammed with sticky notes can wither away rather quickly. If you’re vying for a more efficient way to organize tasks and improve team productivity, it may be time to upgrade to a digital Kanban board.
Combining a visual representation of your tasks in the form of a digital kanban board with a real physical board can inculcate brilliant benefits for you and your company. Whether you are a small, medium, or large business, you can surely revive your work ethics through a reverberated custom of kanban boards.
Managing efficiency with digital Kanban boards
A digital kanban board can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, making it the most reliable and far-sighted tool for your clinic. MyOrthoLab® technicians work in an almost completely digital laboratory. That being said, some aspects of work like the fabrication of removable appliances will require some handy work and cannot fully pass as digital work.
For this purpose, we have set a kanban board that addresses both facets of work. Parallel to the digital workflow, we have created shelves for each technician to match the digital board.
- An entrance compartment for the entire laboratory
- A distribution to the individual employees
- The workstation itself
This efficient three-phase system allows us to optimally monitor the Work-in-progress (WIP) tasks for each technician, limit it, and distribute the work fairly and uniformly in the flow. Every technician is also able to see the tasks their colleagues are working on, promoting a culture of transparency and accountability.
By coupling with the digital system, every piece of work can be tracked from anywhere by smartphone or PC. At the same time, multiple simulated automation can also be programmed, for example, e-mails to customers with information about the current phase of the work. On the off-chance of missing documents, tasks are automatically sent to the administration. Warnings or triggers will be sent if a certain work remains in one phase for too long.
As you can see, the kanban system offers an inexhaustible potential to optimize your practice. If you’re worried that the introduction of the digital kanban boards may cause increased monitoring and additional pressure on your employees, that is not the case. In fact, the kanban boards do the opposite: they make the process more controlled by the creation of WIP-limits. This prevents congestion from occurring.
Kanban boards use the same principle of the pull system whereby a pull signal is triggered only when the number of tasks in a column drops below the specified limit. This signals the previous column that a new task can move further until an outstanding completion is achieved.