Kanban

What is Kanban?

Kanban (from Japanese, meaning “signboard”) is a method of visual work flow management developed by Toyota in the 1940s for production management. The core idea: work is displayed as cards on a board, the board has columns by status (e.g. To Do / In Progress / Review / Done), and tasks are moved from left to right only when there is capacity to work on them. Flow is regulated using WIP limits (work-in-progress).

In modern companies, Kanban is found not only in manufacturing but also in IT teams (development tasks), marketing (content calendar), HR (candidate pipeline), and service teams. The same philosophy drives physical Kanban cards in warehouses — when stock falls below the signal level, the card travels to the buyer as a replenishment order.

When it is used

Kanban is suitable wherever work arrives continuously (not in batches) and the team needs to see where the bottlenecks are. An alternative is Scrum (iterative approach with sprints) — a combination of both is called Scrumban.

See the Workflows module, the Production module, and the services industry page.

Related terms

• Gantt — an alternative visualisation with a time axis. See /en/glossary/gantt.
• MRP — a push approach to material vs. the pull-based Kanban. See /en/glossary/mrp.
• Workflow automation — Kanban as the engine of automation. See /en/glossary/workflow-automation.

In Modulario

The Workflows module in Modulario provides native Kanban for any type of work — from service tickets, through the recruitment pipeline (Recruitment module), to production orders. Cards can be filtered, assigned to users, and automated with column transitions.

Kanban board design is fully configurable: columns, colour labels, custom fields, and automations (e.g. “when a card moves to Done, invoice the customer”). For distributed teams, Modulario supports real-time synchronisation — every change is instantly visible to all users without refreshing the page.

An important concept is the WIP limit — the maximum number of cards in one stage at a time (e.g. max 3 tasks “In Progress”). When the limit is reached, the team cannot start a new task until an existing one moves forward. Result: no multitasking, better flow, and identification of bottlenecks.