Value Stream Mapping

It’s a common exercise in the Agile arena to surface improvements in our day-to-day processes throughout the value chain

Overview

It’s a common exercise in the Agile arena to surface any potential improvement in our day-to-day processes. It comes from the lean manufacturing revolution that makes things visible by embedding materials and information on flow diagramming to introduce lean practices.

The idea is to bring together representatives of each vertical section of your System Map and collaborate to outline time spent in between each vertical area (think of it being in a queue ready to be consumed by the next vertical step), where you co-create ways to streamline it.

In Figure 8, the relationship between lead time and process time is shown. The top part of the diagram is a diagram of the process. As mentioned earlier on the left is an image representing the customer and on the right is the final product. In between are all the processes required to create the product. There is an additional line looping back to the world, sales and prospective customers. Below are two bars, one showing lead time and the other process time. This outlined the time spent working on parts of the product development, design and production, and waiting times in between each of these steps. For example, an order is received but it is three hours before the first part of the process begins. This process may take three hours, followed by a three hour wait time which incurs a delay before the next step in the process. Figure 8 shows eight periods of lead time, or delay between the six periods of process time. The aim of lean manufacturing is to minimise these wait times in order to shorten the overall time needed between the order being received and delivered.

You may have already started! Pick up your System Map. And enrich it with variables beyond 'time'; include materials and energy, find the leverage points and how can you streamline it throughout your whole value chain.

Contents

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    Comments

    4 comments
    Christophe Claude almost 3 years ago

    where is the tool?

    2 1
    Ines Garcia over 2 years ago

    The high level is on the description and image, what do you need Christophe?

    0 1
    Randall Saborio about 2 years ago

    The description makes reference to the Figure 8 image, but the image is not provided. There is a thumbnail on the top right corner but it is of no use. Cannot read the text as the image is very small and does not expand when clicked on it.
    This tool would be easier to understand if it could provide a link to a high resolution image. If you check on other tools listed on this platform, relevant resources and documents are shown as attachments.

    0 1
    Ines Garcia about 2 years ago

    If you havent yet had a chance to use VSM, this should be a good starting point https://www.agilealliance.org/resources/experience-reports/value-stream-mapping-how-to-see-where-youre-going-by-seeing-where-you-are/
    what you do here is to expand the variables you account for waste beyond just 'time'

    0 0

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