How to Use Value Stream Mapping in Lean Thinking

How to Use Value Stream Mapping in Lean Thinking

5-6 minutes

Lean thinking, suggested by James Womack, aims to provide a new way to think about how to organize human activities to deliver more benefits to society and value to individuals while eliminating waste. A lean enterprise can have much higher change to be sustained in growth by aligning customer satisfaction with employee satisfaction. They also seek for offering innovative products or services profitably while minimizing unnecessary over-costs to customers, suppliers and the environment.

Lean thinking considers the waste bound to be inadvertently generated by the way the process is organized. The five steps for Lean Transformation is listed as following:

Identify value from the standpoint of the end customer by product family.

1. Identify all the steps in the value stream for each product family, eliminating whenever possible those steps that do not create value.

2. Make the value-creating steps occur in tight sequence so the product will flow smoothly toward the customer.

3. As flow is introduced, let customers pull value from the next upstream activity.

4. As value is specified, value streams are identified, wasted steps are removed, and flow and pull are introduced, begin the process again and continue it until a state of perfection is reached in which perfect value is created with no waste.

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Mapping Value Stream and Finding Waste

The basic insight of lean thinking is that if you train every person to identify wasted time and effort in their own job and to better work together to improve processes bye liminating such waste, the resulting enterprise will deliver more value at less expense while developing every employee’s confidence, competence and ability to work with others.

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is fundamental tool to identify waste, reduce process waste. It is an essential lean tool for an organization wanting to plan, implement, and improve while on its lean journey. VSM helps users create a solid implementation plan that will maximize their available resources and help ensure that materials and time are used efficiently. Value Stream Analysis is a powerful planning tool to optimize result of eliminating waste.

But what is a waste anyway?

Waste can come in the form of time, material, and labor. But it may also be related to the utilization of skill-sets as well as poor planning. VSM helps to optimize process steps and eliminating waste, only true value is added at each phase of production.

“The elements of an activity that do not add value from the customer perspective” Seven form of originally conceived when the Toyota Production System was first conceived, and an eighth added when lean methodology was adopted within the Western World. In there, 7 / 8 wastes are production process oriented, while the eighth waste is directly related to management’s ability to utilize personnel.