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by
Karen Martin
Read between
June 8 - July 4, 2019
Once the team members agree on the process blocks, they write a description of the activities in the fewest words possible and in verb-plus-noun format
The purpose of the second value stream walk is for the team to gain a deeper understanding about how the value stream currently performs and identify significant barriers to flow.
assess its performance in terms of both time and quality.
While process time is important, opt for accuracy over precision.
Value-adding effort is work that your external customer values and is willing to pay for—or that’s a requirement of doing business with the customer. All other expenses and effort are non-value-adding.
there are two types of non-value-adding work: necessary and unnecessary.* Necessary non-value-adding work includes activities that an organization believes it must presently do to have a viable business. We sometimes refer to this work as value-enabling. In other words, if this work wasn’t performed, the organization would be hard-pressed to deliver value. Unnecessary non-value-adding work is true waste: the customer doesn’t value it and the business doesn’t have to do it to remain a viable enterprise.
Some value stream mapping activities benefit from having the team evaluate each process block to determine if the work being done is primarily value-adding (as viewed by the external customer), primarily necessary non-value-adding, or primarily unnecessary non-value-adding, keeping in mind that some process blocks may include all three types of work.
label the process blocks with a “VA” for value-adding or an “N” for necessary non-value-adding.
Percent Complete and Accurate (%C&A)
It reflects the quality of each process’s output. The %C&A is obtained by asking downstream customers what percentage of the time they receive work that’s “usable as is,” meaning that they can do their work without having to correct the information that was provided, add missing information that should have been supplied, or clarify information that should have and could have been clearer.
If a department reports that people have to correct, add missing information, or clarify incoming work 30 percent of the time before they can do their work, the upstream supplier of that work is delivering 70 percent quality. The 70 percent metric is placed on the Post-it for the process that produced the output, not the receiving department.
Barriers to Flow
Barriers to flow are any actions or conditions that inhibits the uninterrupted progression of work.
Work is often batched in office and service environments, even when those doing the work don’t recognize it as such.
There are two primary types of batches: (1) batch size—holding work until a specific number of items have accumulated (e.g., entering orders once 10 have been received), and (2) batch frequency—performing an activity at a specific time of day, week, or month (e.g., nightly system downloads).
Shared Resources or Inaccessible Staff If those responsible for performing the work have multiple obligations and priorities that make them unavailable to do the work as soon as it arrives, this may present a significant barrier to flow. If staff is unavailable or inaccessible for other reasons (e.g., significant travel, medical leave), this, too, should be noted. When relevant, it’s helpful to show the percentage of time staff is typically available to perform the process when the work arrives.
Prioritization Rules During the value stream walk, it’s helpful to ask how people prioritize their work to discover differing and/or conflicting rules that may exist, either formally or informally.
Work-in-process is the accumulation of work between or within processes.
It’s a symptom of overproduction, overburden, batching, poor incoming quality requiring rework, variation in prioritization rules, variation in skill proficiency, and so on.
work can accumulate in three places, and you must include the quantities in all three places to get the accurate work-in-process quantity for the process you’re reviewing: (1) work that’s in queue but hasn’t been started yet, (2) work that’s being processed but hasn’t been completed, (3) work that’s b...
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Number of People We often include the number of people who currently perform the work described on the Post-it. This data is especially helpful if, during future state design, the team sees the need for work balancing or designating resources to a specific value stream.
In some cases, it’s relevant to include not only how many people regularly do the work, but how many are trained and capable of doing the work. You may also want to record the number of people if there is insufficient backup to cover vacations, staff vacancies, and so on.
Work Trigger The mapping team should note how people know to do work. Does work arrive physically, or is it noted in an electronic queue? If electronic, is it pushed to the person, or does the person have to seek it out? Are there visual work management boards in the work area? Is the incoming work triggered by a phone call, conversation in the hallway, a fax, or a customer arriving on-site?
Remember that the lead time for a process block begins when the work is available to be worked on, not when an employee begins working on it,
We typically opt for the unit of measure that yields the smallest whole numbers—e.g., a lead time of 12 business days is far easier to wrap one’s mind around than 96 hours or 5,760 minutes.
We prefer to express the lead time in one or two units of measure higher than process time to draw attention to the delays (e.g., “Why does it take 2 days to complete 20 minutes of work?”).
rework (correct, add, or clarify)
*Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the failure to notice an unexpected stimulus in one’s field of vision when other attention-demanding tasks are being performed. It often occurs when there are excessive stimuli in one’s environment. For more information, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness.
Blindness
†Other goals of value stream mapping are to eliminate mura (unevenness) and muri (overburden).
The Complete Lean Enterprise
Book
The Kaizen Event Planner (Productivity Press, 2007),
Book
the facilitator’s role shifts from a coach who helps a team uncover and analyze “what is”—a left-brain activity—to a coach who inspires a team to innovate and design “what could be”—a right-brain activity.
building high-performing value streams,
Remember that we define optimal performance as delivering customer value in a way in which the organization incurs no unnecessary expense; the work flows without delays; the organization is 100 percent compliant with all local, state and federal laws; the organization meets all customer-defined requirements; and employees are safe and treated with respect. In other words, the work should be designed to eliminate delays, improve quality, and reduce unnecessary cost, labor effort, and frustration.
In the Lean community, improvement has rightly been focused on adding value through the elimination of waste (muda), unevenness (mura), and overburden (muri).
there are eight categories of waste: overproduction, overprocessing, errors, inventory, waiting, transportation, motion, and underutilization of people (in terms of ...
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given the ultimate goal of optimal performance for the entire value stream, one department may need to take on additional work and/or people, redistribute authority, give up some of its existing work and/or people, give up equipment, or relocate staff. This shift may challenge prevailing mindsets and behaviors around resource allocation, budget creation and management, problem solving, and improvement. Embracing value stream thinking is a mark of an organization that has successfully shifted from siloed thinking (what’s best for me and my team?) to holistic thinking (what’s best for the
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all work effort is classified as value-adding, necessary non-value-adding, or unnecessary non-value-adding.
In terms of priorities, mapping teams should place their greatest attention on removing unnecessary non-value-adding activities, followed by reducing the work effort to perform necessary non-value-adding work (and finding ways to convert work that appears to be necessary non-value-adding to unnecessary non-value-adding), and lastly on reducing the work effort to perform value-adding activities.
It’s important to remember that reducing process time will free capacity (people). If freeing capacity results in a decision to lay off people, there will be unintended negative consequences. Companies that have the greatest success with sustained Lean transformation make an up-front commitment that eliminating work won’t result in eliminating people.
The team should be bold in its thinking and keep only those processes that are truly value-adding or absolutely necessary for the business to function. All else is waste.
The goal is to “move the numbers” as aggressively as organizational maturity and the transformation time frame will allow. For many value streams, merely defining the “right work” will enhance flow and move the needle toward your measurable target condition(s). But the greatest movement will result from intentionally focusing on creating flow.
Ideally, the “work item” passing through the value stream never stops. It moves effortlessly from person to person, work team to work team, department to department, division to division with no hang-ups, hiccups, headaches, or delays.
key question: What is preventing the lead time from being the same as the process time for each and every process block? In other words, what are the barriers to flow as they appear on the...
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future state that results in lower lead time (LT), lower process time (PT), and higher percent complete and accurate (%C&A) for every process block.
Other ways include shifting previously consecutive processes to parallel activities, combining tasks to reduce handoffs (which may require cross-training, resequencing, or repatterning work so that downstream recipients can do more effective work), resequencing work (starting work earlier in the process or delaying the start of work), and creating service-level agreements between internal suppliers and customers, to name a few.
two critical questions: (1) how will you determine if the value stream is performing as you intended? and (2) who will monitor and manage value stream performance?
The problem is that most organizations have established neither value stream KPIs (remember that most don’t even have their value streams defined, let alone mapped and actively improved) nor process-level KPIs.
continue to fight fires, don’t capture greater market share, don’t generate as much profit as they could, have burned-out workforces, and create self-inflicted chaos that they could otherwise avoid.
