What is value stream mapping? A lean technique for improving business processes

Businesses are always looking for ways to run leaner by reducing waste and redundancies in business processes across the enterprise. Value Stream Mapping (VSM) has its origins in manufacturing, but has proven to be just as useful in organizations as a visual mapping technique to optimize and improve systems and processes. By implementing value stream mapping techniques, companies can eliminate waste in development processes, identify and predict supply chain bottlenecks, and increase customer value by delivering improved services and products.

What is value stream mapping?

Value stream mapping is a lean management technique for analyzing the flow of materials, requirements, and data associated with a specific process, system, or product. VSM requires strong communication and collaboration between departments. For organizations with siled or siled departments, fostering greater collaboration across lines of business could be a worthwhile adjustment.

Implementing value stream mapping can be time-consuming, especially when you select a complex process, product, or system to analyze. The larger the project, the more people and business units will be involved – meaning you may need to spend months or even years finalizing and implementing your VSM strategy.

Benefits of value stream mapping

VSM benefits organizations as an efficient technique to identify and communicate the necessary characteristics of complex systems. It enables companies to visualize each step in a process – typically a manufacturing or development process – and to identify all required inputs and stakeholders for each step. With VSM, everyone can see how their work supports and adds value to the system, and it creates an efficient way for everyone involved to track progress.

A value stream map also provides insight into any resource, progress, and availability issues, facilitating continuity process improvement. It can help determine staffing needs, track downtime, identify error rates, spot production delays, and spot inventory issues before they become a problem. VSM provides a central point for all stakeholders to check in, make improvements, spot potential issues and see how things are progressing towards originally set goals.

Process of value stream mapping

Before you can begin creating a value stream map, you must objectively assess your organization’s business processes, products, and systems. Start talking to executives, department heads, and other key stakeholders who can give you more insight into opportunities for improvement. They need to gain hands-on experience with the process, product, or system themselves, and let other employees guide them through their part. A successful VSM involves everyone who has experience, knowledge and expertise about the product or system being mapped, so no details are overlooked and everyone is working from the same information.

It is important to collect as much data as possible – for example inefficiencies in the process, how many people are involved, what resources are used and downtime. Any potentially relevant or notable data is helpful in fleshing out your final VSM flowchart and gaining insights into what can be refined or improved.

You then create two separate VSM flowcharts—a current state value stream map and a future state value stream map. Your current VSM status is used to determine how the process is currently running and functioning within the organization. This is where you demonstrate issues, key learnings, and establish key requirements. Future State VSM, on the other hand, focuses on what your process will look like once your organization has completed the necessary improvements.

As you work as a team to develop the maps, you can eliminate or consolidate steps to make the final flowchart easy to understand. Once set up, you can place the value stream map in a frame such as a frame Kanban, which is used for agile development. Kanban boards allow you to create a visual construct, either physically or digitally, so everyone can track the progress between each step.

Whenever the organization updates a process or makes a process improvement, the value stream map needs to be updated to reflect the changes. Typically, this is something that can be done on a monthly basis if needed. Once the changes are implemented, it’s important to see if they cause problems elsewhere in the process and make adjustments accordingly.

Value Stream Mapping Steps

Founded by Peter Hines and Nick Rich of the Lean Enterprise Research Center in Cardiff, UK Seven value stream mapping tools Founded in 1997 to help companies get started with value stream mapping. Hines and Rich point out that the VSM toolkit should not be limited to “a particular theoretical approach”. It’s up to your organization to decide which Agile or Lean management framework to use, but the authors affirm that following these seven steps will help you implement value stream mapping alongside any IT management framework of your choice . Include relevant lean and agile IT management frameworks kaizen, Lean Six SigmaKanban or Business Process Reengineering.

1. Assignment of process activities: Create process flows, identify waste and redundancies, and analyze workflows and business processes.
2. Supply Chain Response Matrix: Identify any obstacles in the process using a simple diagram.
3. Production type funnel: Look at other competitors and industries to see what solutions they came up with to similar problems.
4. Forrester Effect Mapping: Create line charts that plot customer demand versus production to visualize supply, demand, and potential delays.
5. Quality filter assignment: Identify any deficiencies or problems in the supply chain.
6. Decision Point Analysis: Determine push-and-pull demand in the supply chain, a process for determining production orders based on inventory or customer demand.
7. Physical Structure Mapping: A top-down overview of what the supply chain looks like at an industry level.

Value stream mapping icons

Because VSM is all about visualizing a process, symbols help identify different parts of the process on the value stream map. These symbols help organize VSM flowcharts and are often standardized within an industry or organization.

There are common icons that organizations adopt, but when there’s something unique or specific to an organization, it’s not uncommon to design your own icons. The important thing is that everyone involved in the process understands what each symbol means. There are four main categories these symbols fall under:

• Process Icons: Process symbols are used to identify different types of processes within a value stream map and to identify parts of processes that waste resources or involve customers or clients. Commonly used process symbols include those denoting customers and suppliers, dedicated process flows, shared processes, and merged processes.
• Material Icons: Material symbols identify the parts of a process that rely on inventory and supply chain. Commonly used material symbols include those used to identify stock, shipments, stock availability, stock drawn, and external shipments.
• Information symbols: Information symbols are used to show where and how information is involved in a process. Symbols commonly used for information include those identifying production control, inventory issues, inventory control, areas that require spot checking, and information about the process that has been communicated orally.
• General symbols: All other symbols usually fall under general symbols if they don’t fall under the other three categories. Common icons include those identifying operators, miscellaneous information, schedules, equipment, stock, orders, quality issues, and potential solutions or improvements.

Value stream mapping software

You don’t need any advanced tools or software to create a VSM flowchart as you can easily draw it on a whiteboard. However, creating a value stream map can be a lengthy process involving multiple departments and multiple key stakeholders. Therefore, you might want to invest in software that simplifies the process.

VSM software can help you create flowcharts, keep everyone in the loop, and provide collaboration and visualization features that make it easy for everyone to stay on task. You can also find online value stream mapping templates that can help you get started mapping your business processes.

Here are some popular VSM software tools to get you started:

• Creative
• Edraw
• eVSM software
• LucidChart
• Microsoft Vision
• smart draw
• panel
• Visual paradigm online

Training and certification in value stream mapping

If you want to learn more about VSM and create a value stream map, or want to implement the process in your company, you will find numerous courses and training courses on the subject. Most are offered online and you can even find some specific to relevant Lean or Agile management frameworks such as Six Sigma.