A Cloud-based Kanban Decision Support System for Resource Scheduling & Management

For many decades, lean manufacturing methodologies have become a panacea for manufacturing system improvement particularly in operations and supply chain management. The paper demonstrates how a cloud-based Kanban decision support system, combined with a robust continuous improvement methodology, can help operation managers to make an efficacious decision. Various applications in the literature infer Kanban as a method to control inventory. We propose a novel method named, Estimated, Actual and Total (EAT) Kanban Decision Support System (DSS), that has practical application in a dashboard type monitoring of processes. We share successful prototype implementation that leads to consolidation of 157 spreadsheets into one database. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.