Leaning Your VSM

While evaluating your Value Stream Map, consider the following questions outlined by industryweek.com in order to “lean” (Hild, 2009) your business process: 1. Where are you now? 2. Where do you want to go? 3. What work must be done to move toward the future state? 4. Why hasn’t the work already occurred? The article, “Value Stream Mapping: Making It Work,” emphasizes that the mapping can be used for more than just creating a flow of activities necessary to the functionality of your business. One of your primary goals should be to get rid of the weeds that are either prolonging your process, creating unnecessary costs, or creating complexities. Also, as you observe the various branches of activities pictured on your map, find ways to consolidate tasks and steps to eliminate gaps and the possibility of needing more personnel. Article: http://www.industryweek.com/lean-six-sigma/value-stream-mapping-making-it-work An article on Six Sigma titled, “The Lean System of Motivation,” explains how value stream maps can also be used for problem solving and delegating job duties to team members in order to improve the decision-making process.

Article: http://www.industryweek.com/lean-six-sigma/lean-system-motivation Also, I thought this excerpt from an article written by the Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute was quite helpful for deciding what processes are crucial to a business system: “The objective in drawing the map is to identify each significant action required to create the desired value. These are carefully written down, along with information about the performance of each action. Specifically, we want to know whether each action (also called a process step) is: • Valuable, meaning whether it actually creates value from the standpoint of the customer. The simplest measure of the value of a step is to ask if the customer would be less satisfied with the product if this step could be left out. For example, leaving out the step of painting a car would be a problem for practically all customers for motor vehicles. They think that paint adds to the value of the product. But leaving out all rework and touch-up required to get a good paint finish wouldn’t bother any customer. These latter activities are waste and need to be steadily reduced. • Capable, meaning the degree to which a good quality result is achieved every time. This is the core concern of the quality movement, and the starting point for many Six Sigma projects. • Available, meaning the degree to which the step is able to operate when it is needed. This is the core concern of Total Productive Maintenance. In typical operations, many steps can’t produce a good result a significant fraction of the time (a capability problem), and won’t run at all a significant fraction of the time (an availability problem). Toyota often combines the issue of capability with the issue of availability to estimate the stability of an action. • Adequate, meaning the degree to which capacity is in place to respond to customer orders as needed. Adequacy is commonly the focus of Theory of Constraints and bottleneck analysis, and analysis of bottlenecks is often essential to improve the performance of a value stream. As I walk along value streams all over the world, however, what I more commonly see is vast excess capacity. Most steps have more than adequate capacity, and this creates waste of a different type. This waste occurs because equipment designers still want to build large machines designed for lowest cost per step at high target volumes. However, from a lean thinker’s standpoint, the one thing that is certain is that market forecasts of demand are wrong. Such errors lead either to chronic overcapacity or intractable undercapacity, when getting even a small amount of additional capacity requires purchase of another large machine. The lean thinker’s answer is to “right size” equipment whenever possible to create the possibility for labor and capital linearity. This means the ability to add and subtract small increments of machinery and manpower, so that both are fully utilized over a wide range of volumes. • Flexible, means the degree to which a process step can switch over quickly and at low cost from one member of a product family to another. Flexibility permits the production of very small batches, or even lots of one, with many benefits for the entire value stream—as we will see in a moment. Flexibility has, of course, been a hallmark of the Toyota Production System.” Article: http://www.sme.org/Tertiary.aspx?id=30192&terms=value%20stream%20mapping%20%2bwomack#sthash.1K3x6kon.dpuf