Kanban Implementation in a Telecom Product Maintenance

Telecom Product Maintenance at two Ericsson R&D Centers implemented Kanban. The third level maintenance is performed by the Customer Support Request (CSR) teams and by the design maintenance teams, which are located in two sites. There are separate backlogs for the customer support and for the design maintenance in the primary site and a third backlog for the design maintenance in the secondary site. Pull mindset, team working, team empowerment, and continuous improvement have become part of the everyday activities. Best practices from Scrum have been selected to complement the Kanban implementation. Also, the metrics have been reviewed. The major challenges have been related to the boundary rules, for instance, multi-site working, the platform dependency and the service level agreements but also to the roles and responsibilities. The Kanban boards and the chosen practices have been adjusted as the understanding of Lean has increased. This industry paper presents the journey to Lean product maintenance including the identification of the key success factors that are to some extent generalizable. First, the overall implementation is discussed followed by a deeper description of the implementation both in the CSR handling and in the Fault Handling (design maintenance) including also the experiences from the secondary R&D site. The paper continues by discussing the identified challenges and positive effects. At the end of the paper, the implementation concepts and key success factors are stated.