Value Stream Mapping and Lean

Value Stream Mapping is a Lean technique used to analyze the flow of products, materials, services and information currently required to bring a product or service to a consumer.

The main phases of a Value Stream Mapping implementation are:

• Identify the target product, product family, or service.
• Draw a current state value stream map, which shows the current steps, delays, and information flows required to deliver the target product or service. This may be a production flow (raw materials to consumer) or a design flow (concept to launch). There are 'standard' symbols for representing supply chain entities.
• Assess the current state value stream map in terms of creating flow by eliminating waste
• Draw a future state value stream map. Implement the future [edit] Where is it used? Value Stream Mapping is commonly used in Lean environments to identify opportunities for improvement in lead time.

Although Value Stream Mapping is often associated with manufacturing, it has also been used very successfully in logistics, supply chain, financial services, service related industries, healthcare, software development, and product development and many other industries.

The value adding steps be drawn across the centre of the map and the non-value adding steps be represented in vertical lines at right angles to the value stream. Thus the activities become easily separated into the value stream which is the focus of one type of attention and the 'waste' steps another type. He calls the value stream the process and the non-value streams the operations.

The thinking here is that the non-value adding steps are often preparatory or tidying up to the value-adding step and are closely associated with the person or machine/workstation that executes that value adding step. Therefore each vertical line is the 'story' of a person or workstation whilst the horizontal line represents the 'story' of the product being created.

Value stream maps are can be usually drawn by hand in pencil to keep the mapping process simple and allow for simple correction. The idea is that a map can be drawn without delay while observing the target process in situation. However, there are sophisticated software tools as an alternative. A variety of tools are available either as stand alone products or stencils/add-ons to products such as Microsoft Visio, allCLEAR and iGrafx FlowCharter among the most widely used.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material adapted and condensed from the Wikipedia article on Six Sigma.