One of my favorite tools in the lean
toolbox is value stream mapping, and by the end of this video you're gonna have
a great introduction on how to value stream map, and if you want to be a
project ninja stick around to the end of this video and I will be sharing with
you my checklist on why projects fail. Hi if you're new here welcome, my name is
Adrian and Girdler, I'm a Productivity specialist and a project management
professional, for videos on how to help you excel in your career and projects,
subscribe to my channel, hit that Bell button, and a new video will be coming to
you every Wednesday. Over the years I have created tons of value stream maps
for my clients who are looking to improve their processes, to understand
where issues were, or even to see about future states and how they can make that
work in their organization, so in this video we're gonna look at the what, the
how-to, and most importantly as well, when to use it so stay tuned. Let's get to it,
what is value stream mapping, well value stream mapping is like a snapshot,
someone taking a picture on top of your organization, and really looking from
true start when a customer puts an order in, to true finish and the processes in
between to when you send out that product or service to your customer, so it's a
really cool tool, heavily used in manufacturing, but can also be used in a
non manufacturing setting as well, value stream mapping ground rules, ok awesome
tool, but there's a few ground rules you really have to take note of, first and
foremost you have to walk the value stream, so if you're gonna collect any
data you have to start at the beginning, so when a customer actually calls in
their order or requests a service where does that start in your organization, so
you actually have that starting point and you walk the stream, when you walk the
stream you always want to be talking to the subject matter experts, so if a
customer makes a phone call for an order, or request first service, where's the
first place does that happen, probably someone in planning, or customer service,
so you're gonna go there, you're gonna get data, you're going to ensure that you
have all the information you need, and you need to collect it in sequential
order, like you're actually following the flow of what that product or service is
going for, and the nice thing here is, it doesn't
have to be perfect, it's a high level snapshot remember, so you just want to
have an idea of how things actually work, and those are the ground rules, before
you get started how to draw a value stream map, let's hop on my computer and
I'll show you how to do it, all right so you're now ready to map, do a value
stream map of a process or a particular product, or service, because you want to
have an understanding as to what's really going on from a high-level
perspective, but before you can even start you need to understand the icons,
so these icons are very specific, you have your customer supplier icon,
shipment truck, because you need to get things to and from, process steps become
really important and we'll talk about that soon, you have your production
control, inventory, now you have these arrows, so when you're pushing something
you have this push arrow, you have a shipment arrow, you have electronic
information, so whenever something is being sent electronically, if something
is being done manually, you have just a straight arrow, and last but not least
when you're done everything, you're going to analyze for opportunities of
improvement, and we call this a KAIZEN BURST, all right, so how do you start a
value stream map, you can already see I have something here in the corner, well
you always start with the customer, and the customer is, which can by the way be
an internal customer or an external customer, and it's always on the top
right hand corner, so with the value stream map you're actually going to work
your way from the right to the left, all the way down, and then you're going to go
from left to right, and then back up to the customer, so it's cyclical when
you take a peek at it, so who is the customer in this particular process step,
well it's one of my clients Microsoft, and they put in an order for 200 units
of a spark shift book series that I have, and there's six pocket books in that, and
how do they do that, so how do I know that Microsoft wants this order, and this
is why you do this value stream map, because it really shows you from true
start to true finish how these particular and what we're measuring now,
is the book series, how it gets out the door, and what we do with it, so they
actually went online to our store, and they put an order
through, and our store then sent us an email, which then goes to cornerstone
dynamics production control, we then take a look and we realize we only have 25
units in stock, so we're gonna have to do something with it, we're gonna have to do
a print in order to meet this demand, but we also have a conversation and realize
that we would like to do some revisions and that they're needed
We've had the spark shift series book around for a while, it supports a lot of
the work we do, and we just want to ensure, and take a review of it, because
here's an opportunity since we're doing a printing run to just have updated
information, always important from a continuous improvement perspective to
always ensure that you're up-to-date with the latest and greatest stuff, so
once we make that decision that a revision is needed, we then call our
graphic designer, we bring her up and we're telling her that this is what
we're going to be doing, we also call the print house, because we know at some
point very soon in the near future they're gonna get a brand new print
ready template in order to produce our books, because ultimately we want to
service our client by providing and filling an order, so from a value
stream map perspective, this top portion is important, it's the information flow, I
just don't snap my fingers and things happen, you actually have to get it from
somewhere, and this information flow is really critical, because there can be
some potential opportunities of improvement here, so it's
interesting, you really need to take a look at this from true start to true
finish, and information is the first place where you start, now, now that we
have the information flow, we're gonna go into the process flow, because now
there's a physicality of actually fulfilling this order, so what happens is,
the graphic designer sends us the book drafts, which are in a Word document, and
it is sent to our first process steps, review and update, so now what we are
going to do, is we're gonna go across here and start capturing all the process
steps, but before we do that we need to make a decision as to what data we are
going to collect as we're getting the process steps, because the point of this
is to really have a snapshot of how things
truly work, so now I'm going to go into process flow data collection, so there's
three areas people really look at, they look at resource based data, time based
data, and quality based data, the value stream map that I'm creating for you is
a non traditional one, and what I mean by that is, it's not a manufacturing setting
value stream map, but this is a service setting, I have a product definitely, but
there's just people in an office at desks, kind of doing the work, except when
it goes to the printer, so a lot of times value stream maps were really focused in
the manufacturing setting, so you're gonna see some things in here that's not
hurry up routine to us, which is set up time, and change over time, but I'm
putting it in here in case there's one of you that are watching this who want to use it in a manufacturing setting, but again the cool thing with the data is, you're going
to decide what it is that you need, but the reason why we have to talk about it
now is, we have to figure out when, or what are we going to truly measure, and
ensure that we do that across the board, so let's look at resource based data, we
always want to look at the batch size, which is a total items completed in the
process step, we also will look at the people, how many people does it take to
actually complete this step, when we look at time-based data, again set-up time and
change over time we're very applicable in the manufacturing because it talks
about the equipment, like the time it takes to set it up, and the time it takes
to changeover, but what is really important in the world of efficiency,
which is where you really use these particular Map, is the value-added time,
time it takes for one unit from the batch to be completed, so why is this
important, because it's all about the customer, and the customer only really
wants to pay for their product that transforms it once, so the customer is
not silly, the customer knows that it takes time to transform a product and
they're okay that is going to go from one step to another, they get it, but if I
have to do three revisions I don't want you to pass that cost on to me as a
customer, so this is why we take a look at what does it take to do this one
particular batch right the first time, and then total time, is a total time for
the batch to be completed for the process step,
and last but not least is quality for us, we're gonna meet completion accuracy
percentage, so once the batch is complete, what's the accuracy percentage of
completing the items a first time, so do we have any rework that we have to do, so
we just want to have an understanding as to how good we are, so this is what we're
gonna take a look at, and in this particular process flow, the batch size
are the six books, because those we're still in working draft mode, we have two
people who are doing a review and update, our value-added time truly is of us getting
it right the first time once is 30 minutes per book, which gives us a total
time of 180 minutes, and our accuracy of doing our work is about 90%, so we just
go back and forth a little bit amongst these people to ensure that okay, we'll
get it soon at 100%, so now what happens, well we push it those six working draft
books to the first draft editing, and this is where two people take a look at
it, about one hour per book, six hours in total, and from our perspective of the
editing we're at 96%, so this is where we email the graphic designer, we say then,
okay here's our edited versions, can you now please get it ready for print, and we
then go to that next stage, where we are QCing the supplier material, and
what we're noticing is back and forth, we have a lot of revisions that were going
back and forth with them, actually three times, so for those six books one person
is doing the QC, which is quality control, takes them about one hour per book, six
hours in total, but we're finding the accuracy is only at 70 percent, so
there's a lot going on here, once we're comfortable we then push it over to
final approval, so this is where we have one person at Cornerstone dynamics
looking, approving, and giving it a 100% thumbs-up, we're good to go,
and that's when we send our emailed with the material attachments to the print
test, we then go with those six books, we then ask for print proofs, so they send
us some print proofs, and through those print proofs we go back only one time so
our accuracy is really good, our timing to take a look at those proofs we are
really happy with, and we just had to go back and forth one time, now the
next step is proof approval, so once we get those proofs we have the final final
version we take a look at it, takes us about five minutes per book, 30
minutes in total, and we're completely happy with it, we say good to go, please
print, once that's done we're then looking at the spark shift series,
receiving and shipping, so once the printing is done the print house
actually has to ship us physically those books, we then get sent here and then we
now have to fulfill an order, so we pull from our order with the print house the
order that Microsoft order with us originally, so we have 25 units in stock,
so we're now pulling 175 units which in total will give us the 200 units in
order to fulfill the order, and then we ship that to Microsoft, so what you have
here is a value stream map, which is information flow, up here, and the process
flow, so it just really gives us a good snapshot of how we get these books out
the door, from the time they've been ordered, to our client actually receiving
them, but you're not done yet because the last thing you need to take a look at is
what we call a time ladder, so how long does it take to actually go through this
process step, so the top portion here, this step here is called value at a time,
so we're saying a hundred and eighty minutes in this process step is value
added, and that in between this process step it takes one day before we get the
first draft editing, within the first draft editing it's three hundred and
sixty minutes and eight days in between before we get the QC supplier material,
so as you go along here what's really important is when you think about the
book itself, and what it went through from a process step perspective,
it only took 19.5 hours, actually that's not bad for what we're going through,
however our wait time in between each process step was 33 days, so now this
gives us a really good idea as to what's going on with this process, when to use a
value stream map, okay now you know how to actually create a value stream map,
but when do you actually use one, well there's a couple of times that it really
makes a lot of sense to use a value stream map, first and foremost if you're
having issues with a particular product or service, you have some bottlenecks,
some complaints, and you really want to have an idea as to where to look, where
are the issues really stemming from, root cause analysis, so that's one way to
actually use a value stream map, because it's a snapshot, it kind of tells you
where things are that are maybe potential issues, a second place is you
may be into continuous improvement, and so if you actually look at that value
stream, you're gonna see things that are gonna really help you to pick some
continuous improvement projects, now I've also used this quite heavily with
brainstorming, and idea generation, I have had clients who have these visions, like
amazing ideas, but then you have to translate those ideas into actually
something that's going to be workable so, we actually create a future state value
stream map, how do you want this to work, so we actually create something that
goes through the whole stream, and then they can use it as a benchmark to
actually create project plans from, create strategy plans from, and it's real
helpful tool, and the cool thing is yes, it's used heavily in manufacturing, but
you can totally use it in the non manufacturing sector, so let's go back to
the example that we created earlier on, and now let's talk about how I would
interpret the value stream map that we created, so here's an example of when to
use the process map, and why even kind of go through all of this, so if you need to
understand where issues and bottlenecks are in the system, and you want to make
improvements to this, because let's say Microsoft called and said listen, you're
taking way too long to produce books for us and we really need to have that
happen, which by the way would be so upsetting that efficiency company again
this is strictly an example, to me this would never happen, but okay we could go
into clients all the time, and we help them out so these Kanbamers, you saw that earlier on as to what they are, so this is now when I
would analyze this, and go okay, let me take a look, I'm gonna investigate this
area here, and this is why it's so important to actually have this top
information, because to me, why in the heck was it that we only have 25 units
in stock, and not only that, why is it that we made a decision to do a revision,
and ironically enough this happens a lot in organizations, where the process is
fine but somewhat above, who's an executive makes these decisions, and it
has a total impact on the process and delivery, you will not believe how often
that happens, so what's nice about this is, because we've collected it, we now
understand that, wait a minute, there's definitely some things that we want to
do a deeper dive, an investigation, do we have any concerns with how we're
collecting our inventory, how come we don't have a different level or a
different unit that we're going to ensure we always have stock in hand, why
is it that we decide to do revision at this point in time, so these are all
important stuff that really really helps, and we're gonna investigate it, so
I may have a project around here to understand, okay I want to do something,
now I'm also gonna take a peek at what was going on here with our supplier, and
the fact that we only had 70 percent accuracy rate with stuff going back and
forth, and the fact that we had to go back and forth, so often so that to me is
another area that I may have to work with my graphic designer, understand how
they're working, perhaps we even have to change up how we wor, and maybe put some
sort of checklist in place to ensure that they're confirming and checking off
that they're doing their work, in the way that's going to help us to be more
effective and efficient so this to me, because we're going back and
forth so often, and the 70% rate really highlights, okay there's definitely an
area of improvement here that we have to take a look at, because this was a huge
bottleneck for us, and the amount of time, if you take a look eight days and 14
days that really, we have to figure out, so I don't have that information yet, but
I may put a project around that to say, I need to fix this, to improve this flow
process, and in the other area that I would look at and investigate is the
overall wait time, and even the hours it took to
complete the book, how can we make this better, because I really do like the idea
of constantly revising the material, so it's the latest and greatest information,
but you can see how much energy and effort that took, but even the wait time,
like I can't be waiting, or having my clients wait, in order to get their books,
because I want to have the latest material there, and I don't necessarily
want to send them stuff that's really outdated either, so I would then take a
look at this as an opportunity to really make a difference, so this is how you
would use this value stream map from a perspective of understanding issues,
bottlenecks, and deciding what continues to improvement projects you're going to
do based on those issues and bottlenecks, now if you really want to master your
projects definitely go to the link below and grab my checklist on why projects
fail, something that's going to be really helpful and beneficial for you, please
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you know, now if you're inspired by value stream mapping, or your gonna attempt it,
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