Design a Kanban Catering Workflow for a Lisbon Bakery Chain
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Design Kanban columns, WIP limits, and service classes for a Lisbon bakery’s catering flow. Earn a verifiable certificate.
The scenario
Pão & Companhia is a mid-sized artisanal bakery chain (roughly 120 staff across twelve Lisbon storefronts plus one central kitchen) whose business-to-business catering line has grown faster than its informal phone-and-whiteboard coordination habits can support. Corporate catering now competes for the same ovens, packers, and drivers as daily retail production, and the manual hand-offs have become the bottleneck.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
How can a non-technical bakery operations team visualize and control the flow of catering orders from intake to delivery so that late deliveries and client complaints fall?
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Map an existing real-world workflow into discrete Kanban stages with clear entry and exit (done) criteria
- Set and justify work-in-progress limits that match a small operation's actual capacity
- Differentiate classes of service and encode pull policies that route urgent versus scheduled work
- Communicate an operational system in plain language so non-technical staff can adopt it quickly
- Defend operational design choices with sound, evidence-based agile reasoning
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Kanban
Apply kanban to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Process Mapping
Apply process mapping to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Wip Limits
Apply wip limits to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Workflow Design
Apply workflow design to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Stakeholder Communication
Apply stakeholder communication to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Operations Analyst
This challenge mirrors the analyst's core job: turning a messy real-world process into a visualized, rule-based system. You practice mapping a workflow, setting capacity limits, and proving the design works against actual order data — the daily work of improving operational flow.
This challenge sharpens
- process-mapping
- wip-limits
- workflow-design
Process Improvement Coordinator
Coordinators introduce lightweight systems that non-technical teams actually adopt. By designing a Kanban board and writing a guide staff can follow unaided, you build the exact skills needed to roll out continuous-improvement practices in small operations.
This challenge sharpens
- kanban
- workflow-design
- stakeholder-communication
Agile Delivery Associate
Agile delivery roles depend on making work visible and limiting it to what a team can handle. Defining WIP limits, pull policies, and classes of service here translates directly to coordinating flow on software and service delivery teams.
This challenge sharpens
- kanban
- wip-limits
- stakeholder-communication