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Oladipupo Azeez Olaitan

COBACABANA is a card-based concept for workload control, that provides a unique solution for high-mix and variable-routing manufacturing environments, such as job shops. It involves centralized monitoring of workload and release of orders to the shop floor.

Cobacabana, Workload control

Job-shop environments are confronted with the challenge of lack of support for production planning and control. ERP packages provide planning solutions that are not suitable for job shop environments as they do not focus on capacity planning and control. Older card-based control systems such as Kanban and POLCA are suited for repetitive production environments, but not for high-customization low-volume environments such as job-shops.

Production planning does not consider workloads and as a result, throughput times are unpredictable. Additionally, reliability for promised delivery dates is low. Workloads on different work stations are unbalanced.

• Workload and throughput times are kept within their planned levels
• Balancing of workloads is enabled through the use of a centralized planning board
• Allows for predictable throughput times, increasing reliability of promised delivery dates
• Relative urgency of orders is taken into account by the sequence of orders in the backlog list and the procedure for selecting orders to be released

COBACABANA is an acronym that stands for Control of Balance by Card-Based Navigation. Martin J. Land proposed COBACABANA in 2009, as a card-based method that is based on the concept of workload control (WLC); simple to implement; more suited for job shop environments, i.e., production environments with high routing mix, as compared to Kanban that is essentially dedicated to repetitive production environments.