On The Go Prints: Power of Kanban for small teams
“Do I need Kanbanchi to manage workflows if my team is small (yet) and is not connected with large-scale manufacturing or software development?..” David Neely, a graphic designer from On The Go Prints shares the team’s experience of using Kanbanchi to practice JIT and decrease the time between the order and delivery.
Meet the team – On The Go Prints
On The Go Prints is a small company in Ohio, United States, that offers all possible printing services. They design and print flyers, business cards, brochures, make T-shirts and other souvenirs with your individual prints.
Choosing kanban method leads to adopting Kanbanchi
David Neely, a graphic designer, shares his experience:
“My primary role in On The Go Prints is a graphic designer, but because I have a background in IT I have also started helping manage the company’s IT needs. I was already familiar with Kanban as a tool used in project management under the context of software development”
The team needed to get organised and find a way to manage their printing production queue and David Neely suggested using kanban method. The goal was to find something easily accessible and helpful, instead of having a physical board or shuffling papers. As the company used G Suite for a number of things, Kanbanchi was a perfect fit.
When a production goes smoothly
When a customer has an order for business cards, prints, or other printed work, project manager creates a kanban card and adds details about the order, moving them along the production path as the order is designed, finalized, and delivered.
Kanbanchi’s integration with Google Drive helps to keep all the projects organized throughout the production queue by attaching relevant print-ready files and proofs and moving them along as they progress, marking them with colored labels to indicate issues and priority. The team also has another board which functions very similarly for tracking the progress of internal marketing products.
Small team benefits
Right now there are only two people that use Kanbanchi boards, David (graphic designer) and Eric (owner) but they are completely confident that it will be so easy to add future employees to the system — just create Google account for them, share your boards and add a shortcut to their bookmarks toolbar in Chrome, and they’re ready to go.
Eric (owner) and his son Aeson
The nature of a virtualized Kanban board made it very easy for others to quickly pick up on how the system worked — just think of them like index cards on a board.
“The app has improved our production process by allowing us to emulate Just-In-Time (JIT) workflow, decreasing the time it takes to bring printed products from order to customer delivery, and setting up a system which will enable management to easily track the status of projects as the company expands and we hire more employees.” – David Neely, graphic designer
If your team is small yet, don’t hesitate to try Kanbanchi. It’s flexibility will allow you to expand your organisation without any need to search for another tool.