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A heijunka box is a visual scheduling tool used in heijunka, a method originally created by Toyota for achieving a smoother production flow. While heijunka is the smoothing of production, the heijunka box is the name of a specific tool used in achieving the aims of heijunka.
The heijunka box is generally a wall schedule which is divided into a grid of boxes or a set of 'pigeon-holes'/rectangular receptacles. Each column of boxes representing a specific period of time, lines are drawn down the schedule/grid to visually break the schedule into columns of individual shifts or days or weeks. Coloured cards representing individual jobs are placed on the heijunka box to provide a visual representation of the upcoming production runs.
The heijunka box makes it easy to see what type of jobs are queued for production and for when they are scheduled. Workers on the process remove the kanban cards for the current period from the box in order to know what to do. These cards will be passed to another section when they process the related job.