Value Stream Analysis and Mapping for Project Management

Value Stream Analysis and Mapping (VSA/M) is a tool for business process improvement. Value Stream Analysis (VSA) is a method that implements lean principles for the examination of business processes. The tool, focus on the development of tasks which add value to the final product, efficiently linked together to form a continuously flowing stream of value.

History

In order to understand its origins we must look back into the early 40s. By then, Toyota was trying to compete with the American automobile market by productivity means. Taiichi Ohno in 1956 traveled to the US in order to visit the automobile plants and see how could he improve its production system back in Japan. Despite what he saw on those production plants, what catches his attention is the self-service supermarkets in which he could choose exactly what he wanted and how much of it. That idea was efficient as well as timely saver for him and where to become later the fundamentals for pursuing manufacturing improvements. Along the next years Ohno will develop this production system on a systematic framework based on Lean and Just-In-Time principles. Toyota defined six elementary rules:

• Never send defective products downstream to the next process
• Each process only orders what it currently needs from the upstream process
• Each process only produces the quantity ordered by the downstream process
• Maintain a level rate of production
• Use Kanban to fine-tune the rate of production
• Work to reach a stable rate of production

These first studies where focused mainly on manufacturing processes in spite of process design. But the principles can still be applied either to shop floor and non-shop floor activities. And as Womack and Jones describe it, the main principles of lean for product development are:

• Value: providing the customer with the right product, for the right price, at the right time.
• Value Stream: the set of actions that bring a product from concept to realization, order to delivery, or raw material to finished good
• Flow: seamless movement through value-creating steps.
• Pull: acting only to satisfy customer needs, rather than forcing, or pushing, a product upon the marketplace.
• Perfection: continuously and relentlessly improving the value, value stream, flow, and pull in business operations.

Methodology

The value stream must be analyzed and mapped thoroughly to reduce waste along processes and enable flow. Also to move the processes towards a more rapid response for customer pull. On a product development context, this means rapid response towards customer needs when it comes either to new products or permutations of the existing ones.

Discussion

Value Stream Mapping can be thought as a tool which facilitates the transformation from a traditional manufacturing company to a Lean Enterprise. It is a planning tool to target ideal processes and roadmaps to desired improvements.

Related Articles

The lessons from Toyota for product development had been captured by Fujimoto and Clark and Ward and Sobek. Follow the references for further study.

Most of the VSM work that has been acomplished is around the manufacturing context. For practical implementation of VSA/M on manufacturing operations please refer to .