Useful Resources

Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Mapping is part of the Lean Manufacturing toolkit and is used for visualising the flow of material and information through a process.  It is a powerful tool for unlocking hidden capacity and reducing waste in a process.  It works equally well for physical production processes, and administrative process (eg handling invoices, business planning).

Within a process, there will always be three types of work occurring:

• Value-creating work: activities that directly contribute value to the customer (eg applying paint to a newly-built car).
• Incidental work: Work that doesn’t add value directly, but must be done in order to allow the value adding work to be done (eg purchasing the paint).
• Waste:  Non-valuable activity including delays, rework, over-processing, unnecessary transportation and storage (eg touch-ups required due to imperfect paint job).

Often the proportion of value-creating work in a process is low – less than 50% in many cases.  The aim of Value Stream Mapping is to reduce the amount of waste and streamline the valuable and incidental work as much as possible.  This can substantially reduce the amount of time, effort and money required to perform the process.

Value Stream Mapping is most powerful when conducted in a facilitated workshop involving a cross-section of the people involved in the process. The benefits of this approach include:

• Creating a shared understanding of the current process and the waste that exists in it.
• Providing a baseline from which to measure the impact of improvement activities.
• Enabling people to participate in creating a vision for the future.

This workshop involves taking the team through the following steps:

• Identify the process to be studied, and identify the process customers and their requirements.
• Develop a map of the current process, including all process steps, delays, and information flows required to deliver the target product or service. 
• Critically assess the current state map, from the customer’s perspective, looking for opportunities to streamline it by eliminating delays, unnecessary steps, rework and scrap. 
• Draw a future state map which represents the process with the waste removed.
• Develop an improvement plan for moving from the current to the future state.

There are lots of web-based resources on value stream mapping, which are shown in the Featured Articles box.  The Lean Enterprise Institute have some good texts on Lean including:

• Learning to See: Value-Stream Mapping to Create Value and Eliminate Muda by Mike Rother and John Shook  http://www.lean.org/Library/BookDetails.cfm?LibraryBookId=22 

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