, also spelled kamban, and literally meaning "signboard" or "billboard

Billboard (advertising)

A billboard is a large outdoor advertising structure , typically found in high traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertisements to passing pedestrians and drivers...

", is a concept related to lean

Lean manufacturing

Lean manufacturing, lean enterprise, or lean production, often simply, "Lean," is a production practice that considers the expenditure of resources for any goal other than the creation of value for the end customer to be wasteful, and thus a target for elimination...

 and just-in-time (JIT) production. According to Taiichi Ohno

Taiichi Ohno

was a prominent Japanese businessman. He is considered to be the father of the Toyota Production System, which became Lean Manufacturing in the U.S. He devised the seven wastes as part of this system. He wrote several books about the system, including Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale...

, the man credited with developing Just-in-time, kanban is one means through which JIT is achieved.

Kanban is not an inventory control system. Rather, it is a scheduling system that tells you what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce.

The need to maintain a high rate of improvements led Toyota to devise the kanban system.