Quality Improvement and Quality Control. Kanban system not only assists company in saving their
cost by
having fewer inventories but it also controls and maintains quality improvements of the output.
Just in Time (JIT) is one of the elements constituted in total quality management (hereafter termed
as TQM) system (Flynn et al., 1995). For an effective JIT, all delivered parts and products must
achieved certain level of quality standards before those parts and products are accepted for the
next operations or reaching the customer incoming end (input). This is due to the four main reasons includes improved processes can make products
with guaranteed high quality, high quality gives producers a competitive advantage, consumers have
become used to high quality products, and will not accept anything less and high quality reduces
costs such as prevention, appraisal, internal failure and external failure costs (Bernstein, 1984).
Traditional companies believe quality is costly, defects are caused by workers and the minimum
level of quality that can satisfy the customer is enough. Organizations practicing the Kanban
system believe that quality leads to lower costs, that systems caused most defects, and that
quality can be improved within the kaizen framework (Balram, 2003).