The value stream map must be useful. Managers and leaders should keep in mind the following questions when completing a VSM:

• Can you identify the purpose of the process?
• What is being done in the process?
• When is the process being done?
• Who is using the process?
• Where is the process being used?
• How is the process being done?
• How does the process measure up against your metrics?
• How long does the process take?

There are more questions involved obviously, but this is a great starting point to ensure you have a value stream map that is actionable. The value stream map is a representation of the flow, from supply to customer, through your organization as well as the flow of information. This enables you to see at a glance where the delays are in your process, any restraints and excessive. The current state map is the first step in working towards your ideal state for your organization.

We now require a vision of where we want to end up so that we can focus our efforts on achieving an agreed ideal state. A team should create an ideal state value stream map. This map illustrates the absolute best the process could be. This map should then be agreed to by senior management as the ultimate. Kanban systems could be utilized to remove the need for planning and scheduling as well as many other ideas that could be considered. You can plan to achieve your shared vision of where the process needs to be; the simplest way to do this is to plan a series of improvements and use your value stream map to communicate what you want to do.

The value stream map is a crucial tool in the Lean methodology. Understanding the principles, usage and creation is an important skill that practitioners should master.

Hear an interview from Jim Womack, Mike Rother, and John Shook about Value Stream Mapping >>>

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So how do you create a Value Stream Map (VSM)? The first step is to identify exactly what value is from the point of view of the customer. In other words, it’s the customer who specifies what they deem as being value in your product or service.

Here are a view basic steps in getting started:

• Do a walkthrough of the entire process of what it takes to produce the product or service. This has to be done after you have identified what exactly the customer deems as value.
• In the walkthrough, make sure you distinguish between which steps add value and which are waste.
• Make a Value Stream Map (VSM) of the current state of the process.
• Gather data such as time, quality, or any other resources available for each step.

Then, analyze the current tasks on the Value Stream Map:

• Decide the opportunities for improvements.
• Identify bottlenecks and any other obstacles that might restrict flow.
• Find ways to eliminate waste and add value to the current process. 
• Create a prospective future state map to illustrate the goals desired. This future map should make visualizing easy to gain a better perspective.
• Design plans to put future state into action.

Remember, a value stream map should represent or show the entire flow of the process from supplier through to customer, so start to finish. This also should show the flow of all data concerning the VSM. After you are finished creating this VSM, you should be able to pinpoint where the delays take place, or if there are any excesses inventory or obstacles.

A value stream map is one of the most important tools lean provides. Having a VSM will keep you ahead because you will always know exactly what is currently going in the manufacturing process of your business. Knowing what adds value and eliminating waste will keep your business fine tuned!

For more information on our Lean Six Sigma courses or services, please visit our website. 

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Good lean leaders can spend a lot of time telling you about the benefits of value stream mapping and how it can transform your organization into a more adequately structured and maintained one, but the tool is actually seeing surprisingly little use in modern times, far less than you would expect if you were familiar with the positive effects it can provide.

Misunderstanding is likely at the root of those issues, and it does seem true that many lean leaders are severely underestimating the potential of value stream mapping, and are looking in the wrong direction when evaluating what it can do for their organizations.

Improper Mapping Techniques

In order for value stream mapping to work correctly, you need to define your maps well enough. There are many diagram components and techniques that can be applied to this end, and it’s easy to get lost in the whole mess of attributes. This can not only hinder your learning of the tool if it’s not being taught to you by someone already experienced, but it can also give you the wrong impression about what value stream mapping is all about, making it look like a bunch of unnecessarily complex diagrams with no real meaning attached to them.

Furthermore, it’s important to determine the exact processes that are to be mapped, and knowing when to discard some process from the current map is a skill that you’ll have to develop along the way. It won’t seem obvious at first, and even experienced lean experts sometimes find themselves confused over which parts of a process they should include in a VSM, but the more you do it, the more you’ll develop a certain intuition that will help you discard some things right away.

Not Aligning the VSM to the Company’s Goals

Another critical point about value stream mapping is that it requires the input of the whole organization, even people on lower levels. In fact, they can sometimes provide the most valuable input that’s relevant to developing a good VSM, because they can give you a more hands-on overview of how certain processes work.

With that in mind, trying to develop a good VSM on your own without involving other members of the organization doesn’t really make much sense. You’ll end up with something that only focuses on the aspects you find important, disregarding other parts of running the organization which might be critical to other departments.

After all, you’re trying to come up with a tool that will help the whole company understand its current processes better, and move towards a common goal in a unified stride. It makes zero sense to attempt that on your own.

Not Enough Oversight of the Company’s Activities

This can be a tricky one to tackle, but basically, if you don’t have a good overview of the way things are currently running in the organization, this can make it problematic to come up with a good VSM. That, in turn, can give you the wrong idea about the usefulness of the tool, and can lead you to believe that it’s not a tool your organization can benefit from.

But just by applying a little more control over things and ensuring that you always have an adequate way of measuring the results of each process, you will already have a lot of important data that can help you in coming up with better, more accurate value stream maps. In the end, not having enough information about the way your company is being run can hinder your ability to make good maps greatly, and this can lead to frustration and the impression that the tool itself is to blame for not giving you good enough results.

Conclusion

Value stream maps are actually quite useful and will probably remain a central tool for experienced lean leaders for a long time in the future. It’s true that they take some time to get used to, and aren’t exactly intuitive to beginners, but once you’ve overcome the initial learning phase and you’ve started to dig deeper into the intricacies of VSMs, you’ll likely find that they’re the piece that’s been missing from your company’s puzzle all along.

The post Value Stream Mapping: Why Is It Underutilized? appeared first on 6sigma.

Value stream mapping (VSM) is a fundamental lean technique that’s fallen out of use in recent years for various reasons, but it can still be of huge benefit to organizations that use its potential properly. It takes some time to get used to the basic concepts, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you’ll probably never want to put the charts down and you’ll always have some ideas in the back of your mind about how their design can be improved even further.

Fundamental Concepts

On the most abstract level, a value stream map shows how resources flow through your company, from the moment you receive them from your various suppliers, to when they reach the final customer. The map shows a lot of detailed information about the way the process works for example, it can give you a quick preview of the frequency of each process, its timing relation to other processes, and the way the big picture is structured.

Various symbols can be used to represent the different operations going on in your company, and you can get creative to some extent too. For example, phone and mail symbols are not uncommon when presenting the corresponding types of communication, and you can even draw simple mini-diagrams that chart this behavior in additional detail.

Your operations should be split into boxes,” each showing how the specific operation is linked to others within the organization, as well as what kinds of input it receives from other parts of the company. This can be useful for visualizing complex processes that take forecasts and other similar types of data into account.

Choosing the Appropriate Level of Complexity

One of the great thing about value stream maps is that it’s entirely up to you to determine how complex you want your maps to be. You don’t have to plot them in a lot of detail if your operations are relatively simple, and on the other hand, if you need to visualize something truly complicated that doesn’t fit into one single diagram, you can draw multiple connected ones until you have a sufficient level of abstraction in your model.

That’s a huge benefit in value stream maps that not many people use properly, leading to somewhat skewed impressions of what the tool is capable of in the first place, but that’s a different story. The important point to take away from this is that you have a lot of power and flexibility in your hands when you want to develop a VSM that represents the way your organization works in every detail necessary.

Important Data about Processes

There are some data points that you’ll probably end up repeating a lot across your different processes, and it’s a good idea to get familiar with how to best draw them up for the different procedures in your own organization. For example, for manually controlled processes, you’ll want to take the number of operators into account, the way they’re changing their shifts, and the total working time allocated to the process.

Another important detail you may want to look at is the scrap rate,” which will help you identify points where waste is created in your processes. This can be particularly important when you’re trying to optimize the throughput of the organization, and if you keep running into bottlenecks that require a lot of additional maintenance work, this can help you identify where they are occurring.

You’ll probably also have some variables that are specific to your particular business, and you may need to sit down for some brainstorming sessions with your partners and other leaders in the organization to figure out what they are. You don’t need to reflect every tiny detail in that list, and in fact, it’s counter-productive to do so. Make sure you have a clear overview of how the company works from all angles before attempting to figure out those variables, and always get additional input if necessary.

Conclusion

Value stream mapping can be a very powerful tool in the right hands, and once you’ve understood the basics and have overcome the initial barrier of learning, you’ll find this to be an indispensable tool in your arsenal, and something that you’ll try to apply to pretty much every process in your organization in the future.

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Good lean leaders can spend a lot of time telling you about the benefits of value stream mapping (VSM) and how it can transform your organization into a more adequately structured and maintained one, but the tool is actually seeing surprisingly little use in modern times, far less than you would expect if you were familiar with the positive effects it can provide.

Misunderstanding is likely at the root of those issues, and it does seem true that many lean leaders are severely underestimating the potential of value stream mapping, and are looking in the wrong direction when evaluating what it can do for their organizations.

Improper Mapping Techniques

In order for value stream mapping to work correctly, you obviously need to define your maps well enough. There are many diagram components and techniques that can be applied to this end, and it’s easy to get lost in the whole mess of attributes. This can not only hinder your learning of the tool if it’s not being taught to you by someone already experienced, but it can also give you the wrong impression about what value stream mapping is all about, making it look like a bunch of unnecessarily complex diagrams with no real meaning attached to them.

Furthermore, it’s important to determine the exact processes that are to be mapped, and knowing when to discard some process from the current map is a skill that you’ll have to develop along the way. It won’t seem obvious at first, and even experienced lean experts sometimes find themselves confused over which parts of a process they should include in a VSM, but the more you do it, the more you’ll develop a certain intuition that will help you discard some things right away.

Not Aligning the VSM to the Company’s Goals

Another critical point about value stream mapping is that it requires the input of the whole organization, even people on lower levels. In fact, they can sometimes provide the most valuable input that’s relevant to developing a good VSM, because they can give you a more hands-on overview of how certain processes work.

With that in mind, trying to develop a good VSM on your own without involving other members of the organization doesn’t really make much sense. You’ll end up with something that only focuses on the aspects you find important, disregarding other parts of running the organization which might be critical to other departments.

After all, you’re trying to come up with a tool that will help the whole company understand its current processes better, and move towards a common goal in a unified stride. It makes zero sense to attempt that on your own.

Not Enough Oversight of the Company’s Activities

This can be a tricky one to tackle, but basically, if you don’t have a good overview of the way things are currently running in the organization, this can make it problematic to come up with a good VSM. That, in turn, can give you the wrong idea about the usefulness of the tool, and can lead you to believe that it’s not a tool your organization can benefit from.

But just by applying a little more control over things and ensuring that you always have an adequate way of measuring the results of each process, you will already have a lot of important data that can help you in coming up with better, more accurate value stream maps. In the end, not having enough information about the way your company is being run can hinder your ability to make good maps greatly, and this can lead to frustration and the impression that the tool itself is to blame for not giving you good enough results.

Conclusion

Value stream maps are actually quite useful and will probably remain a central tool for experienced lean leaders for a long time in the future. It’s true that they take some time to get used to, and aren’t exactly intuitive to beginners, but once you’ve overcome the initial learning phase and you’ve started to dig deeper into the intricacies of VSMs, you’ll likely find that they’re the piece that’s been missing from your company’s puzzle all along.

The post Value Stream Mapping: Why Is It Underutilized? appeared first on 6sigma.

Value Stream Mapping, or VSM, allows you to visualize the processes used, including all steps from beginning to end of what it takes to bring your product or service into fruition.

The beauty and genius of these maps is that it allows you to see what steps add value to your processes that produces your product or service. At the same time, it allows you to see what steps are of “non-value,” meaning they don’t add any value and can be eliminated, thus saving production time and cost.

The 3 Basic Components of a Value Stream Map

Processes or Production Flow: this shows you the current state of your process, step by step from start to finish. This will show you which steps in your process are effective and efficient, and most of all necessary. Here is your chance to see where waste is occurring and eliminate it.

Communication or Information Flow: in this section, you can see information given, whether formal or informal, of each process of what to do next. You can see both sides of the equation and many times discover conflicting priorities.

Timeline and Travel Distances: these are the physical steps taken within the processes used to make your product or perform your service. If there are a lot of steps taken, this could mean placement of machinery or items used in the process could use some improvement.

The actual design of a Value Stream Map depends on your needs. Many can be designed easily just using Excel on your computer, or if you are old school, graph paper and a pencil. Regardless of what method you use, this is a most valuable tool for having that overall bird’s eye view of your business.

Another benefit of the VSM is that you are able to make future changes because you have the necessary information. No guesswork or intuition needed, just the facts, just one of the many Lean tools that’s priceless in value on many levels.

Get more information on our Six Sigma courses or services.

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