Hello everybody,

Welcome to the latest blog from Lean FSL Associates. I hope you all had a great Summer?

The theme for this blog, is to argue the usefulness, the ‘power’ even of the Value Stream Map. Why do I need to jump to the defence of this lean tool in the first place you may ask?

Well, it stems from a blog article I read from Bob Emiliani (the link to which is posted at the foot of this article). To those of you not familiar with the name, you should check him out. He’s a Professor, an author, and one of the leading Lean thinkers in the world. He always has something interesting to say about the application of lean, and was the first person to coin the concept of Fake and Real Lean. Anyway, in a recent blog Bob suggests (in a tongue in cheek way actually) that many VSM activities are in themselves a cause of enormous amounts of muda and non-value adding activity, as hours and hours are wasted preparing for a workshop that only concludes what the management team knew in the first place!

This made me really think (once I’d got over my initial defensiveness!), am I really wasting my customers time by dragging them through a VSM process that often stretches across 6 – 10 days, that ends up telling them what they already know? Would it be better to just dive straight in and start some ‘kaizen’?

But on reflection, I don’t believe that I have been wasting customer’s time (you’ll be relieved to know), and some of the most profound ‘breakthroughs’ I have helped teams achieve have come through redesigning their processes as part of a Future State Mapping exercise (the 2nd element of a well-structured VSM workshop). If we’d have just ‘kaizened’ what we already had, we wouldn’t have discovered that the processes were not configured to deliver what the customer wants at all. In other words we could have made the processes more efficient, but the business wasn’t being effective at delivering value to its customers. What was needed was a fundamental redesign of the whole flow of value.

In my experience another powerful outcome of a good VSM activity, is that it galvanises management teams into taking action! Once people really start to see the waste in their own organisations, they are almost always horrified, and cannot wait to get started on the process of getting rid of some of the causes of waste. The beauty of the VSM is that at this point we can just put in a checkpoint to ensure that departmental heads don’t go running off doing isolated kaizen activity in their own areas. Instead we put in place a structured plan of action, that prioritises where the greatest business need is, and where the resource should be focussed to meet the strategic needs of the organisation.

I guess Bob’s point is that if VSM becomes too much of a ‘classroom’ exercise, that doesn’t engage people. and just runs up big consultancy bills for clients, then there’s little point in doing it. But I think, done well, its value is to get teams to be very, very intolerant of the status quo, and helps them create a roadmap to a future organisation that more successfully delivers value to its customers!

So, Lean FSL is going to continue to do Value Stream Maps with its customers, as we truly believe that its a vital tool in any Real Lean organisations toolkit. But, we will take on board the point that it must never become an ‘academic’ or tick-box exercise, and we won’t waste time and effort creating fancy computerised maps and presentations, unless we are specifically requested to do so!

If you want to know more about Lean FSLs approach to VSM, I’ve pasted a link to the webpage. Bob’s original article is also below:

http://staging-leanfsl-com.stackstaging.com/value-stream-mapping/

http://www.bobemiliani.com/worse-than-anyone-thought/

 

Happy reading. I’d love to hear your views and experiences of VSM.

Stay lean!

Graham