My family is very kind.  Overall and in that they have taken on faith my insistence that having two dishwashers will be a huge time savings.

I’ve utterly failed to convince them on the merits of the argument.  Also they think I’m being self-important or something when I describe it as a kanban system.  I just think it’s a great idea, but whatever.

Granted this isn’t strictly a kanban system, but it functions basically the same way.  If there’s better term for duplicating capacity for processing reusable components, please tell me.  Examples I’ve encountered in real life are hospital instrument sterilization and fixture/basket cleaning on production line, but these are both a bit different in that (for the most part) the production operation cycle time is longer and more value-added than the cleaning cycle time.  And a typical bottleneck reduction approach is more likely to duplicate the items being cleaned than the cleaning equipment, which we probably don’t want to do with our dishes.  Aimee correctly points out that commercial dishwashers in restaurants address this with interchangeable trays that fit into a rack in the washer and can be removed and the dishes stored on the rack.  But I don’t think these will work aesthetically and they still presume a lot of duplicate, similar dishes.

My main excitement about the two dishwashers is the elimination of non-value-added (NVA) work unloading the dishwasher into other storage locations.  With a dirty and a clean side that switch dynamically, we’ll pull clean dishes as we use them, which I anticipate will eliminate about 80% of the NVA work.  There will still be a tail of less frequently used items to put away.  I can totally live with that.

Because a solid dishwasher and a good kitchen cabinet are more or less the same price, there’s no loss of space or extra investment on a like for like basis.

So one of my key home projects the first half of this year is to build my kanban-dishwasher set up.  Not because it’s important to me to be proved right—although that seems likely—but because I am excited to free up the time to spend on more fun things.  Like writing blogs.  Or spending time with my family!

-Chris