Kanban

Instructions

If you landed here after following the

Make Your First Kanban in 1 Minute⁠

tutorial and have just checked out the email ordering process on the

Ordering⁠

page, you’ve already made two Kanbans, one for an item that you order online, and another for an item that you have to order via email. But a lot of Kanbans just trigger internal resupplies, and now that you’re a bit familiar with Coda, how it works, and how useful the system can be, this is where you’d start defining some of the areas of your shop in the following tables so that as you’re generating Kanbans, you have a list of areas you can pull from and later on down the line, you can start running analytics on your processes and identifying areas for improvement.

You’ve actually already added a few areas to these lists by creating your first few Kanbans, but fleshing them out will make creating future Kanbans much, much easier. After you’ve done that, head over to the

Supplies⁠

page.

Kanbans

Kanban

Supply

Company

Task

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There are no rows in this table

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Instructions

This is the last bit of instruction I’ll write out in this document. Here is where you can define, edit, create, and print your Kanbans. You can even open them here to trigger reorders immediately. To print a Kanban, click the blue

⁠

printer icon, which opens up the Kanban in the correct view, depending on what the internal reorder mechanism is. From the Detail View you can click the three-dot elipsis in the upper-right-hand corner of your screen to print out the Kanban.

The one final thing I’ll note here is that this workflow only supports external reordering of something that is then sent to a storage location. Usually it is taken from that storage location when an internal Kanban requests an item for which the original item is a contributing part. For instance, you might order aluminum, but then the machine shop might get an internal restock kanban requiring new buckle bodies. The aluminum is already in the machining area and is then used to make the buckle bodies, after which it is a different internal item that gets sent to a different internal place. In general, the workflow looks like this:

As a result, external Kanbans only support movement from an external vendor to a storage location at which time it is transformed into a different item with a different storage location (the “Deliver To” location of the Kanban the requested the items from the original storage location, and internal Kanbans only support movement from a storage location to a “Deliver To” location, which is another part of your shop that receives these now-changed items and potentially changes them again in preparation for another process until eventually you end up with finsihed products. All that is to say, this workflow doesn’t support you moving the same item between locations multiple times. it must be transformed into a different item, at which point another Kanban will apply to its restocking mechanism. This is why “Deliver To” is greyed out for external Kanbans and External Supplier is greyed out for Internal Kanbans.

That’s it for the Kanban tutorial! But this document can do so, so much more than track and create Kanbans, now that information about your products and processes is contains within it. It can generate invoices, track deals, conduct bulk outreach, create a publishable, access-restricted page for self-serve wholesale orders, track your processes to identify inefficiencies, schedule your staff, manage long-term projects, and much, much more. Once you wrap your head around the Kanban process, I’m happy to walk you through the confiiguration of future tools. Coda is limitless, and this is merely the beginning.

Kanbans

Kanbans

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