Value Stream Mapping: Get To Know Your Process

Posted on 28. Apr, 2009 by carolesf in Articles

Q:  When you start a project of business process improvement, what’s one of your most useful and versatile tools? 
A:  Value Stream Mapping. 

Value Stream Mapping

is a tool of Lean Thinking which enables you to identify the activities of a business process and their associated costs.  VSM is a great way to create and communicate process changes, and hence is a key component of any change management strategy.  Mapping the current process is usually applied during the “Measure” phase of DMAIC in Lean Six Sigma.  Mapping the desired future process is part of the “Improve” phase. 

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The most basic philosophy of Lean Thinking is “Add only value — that the customer is willing to pay for.”  To achieve this, one of the most important activities you can undertake is to map out your process and discover which steps waste time and/or money.  In Value Stream Mapping, you’ll identify every activity currently required to produce your company’s product or service to the customer.  Each activity must then be assessed as to which of the following categories it falls into: 

(1) Value-add:  Activities which are required to produce what your customer wants to buy.  These are activities which the customer would gladly pay for, if they knew you were doing them behind the scenes.  By all means try to control these costs, but never at the risk of reducing the product’s value in the eyes of the customer.

(2) Non-Value-add:  These are activities which the customer would not want to pay for, but which are required for legal, regulatory, or business reasons.  These also include supporting administrative functions such as HR and Accounting.  They may not directly lead to your customer’s desired product, but just try to run your business without them!  Certainly try to reduce these costs, but you will not be able to eliminate them outright.

(3) Waste:  These are activities which the customer would not want to pay for, and no one else should either.  In Lean Thinking Generates Value — And Profits, I give examples of the “Seven Deadly Wastes”.  Eliminate these immediately if not sooner. 

Makes a lot of sense, but if it were easy, everyone would do it, right?  So how is Value Stream Mapping done?

(1) Start by mapping the existing process.  Map not only materials flow, but also paper flow and information flow.  Such maps often seem complicated and even intimidating at first glance, but once you get to know what the different symbols mean, it will start to make a lot of sense. 

(2) Assess the current process in terms of Value-add, Non-value-add, and Waste activities.  (In some cases, Non-value-add and Waste are binned together.)

(3) Develop a map of the streamlined future process, eliminating wasteful activities.  This is where the art and science come in, and a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt can help.  Takt time, kaizen, kanban, and all those other concepts and techniques of Lean can be used individually or in combination to help you achieve this step. 

(4) Implement the future map. 

Value Stream Mapping is one of the key inputs to assessing how to streamline a given process.  Often once you have identified the costs and binned them into Value-add, Non-value-add, and Waste categories, the necessary process changes can seem to leap right off your computer monitor.  If you know the cost of the original process, and the cost of the streamlined process, the difference is the cost savings directly attributable to your project team’s efforts.

And that makes Value Stream Mapping a highly “valuable” tool for your career, too.

Welcome back to Lean Six Sigma Source! Thanks for your continued support.

Related posts:

  1. Process Mapping: Creating Business Success
  2. Process Flow Chart: Tried and True
  3. Lean Six Sigma: What Is It?
  4. Lean Office: The Next Frontier
  5. Lean Thinking Generates Value — And Profits

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