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 subscribe to my channel, like this video,
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stream mapping, or your gonna attempt it, I'd love to hear from you, I read my
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