You can do a hundred sit-ups a day. You can eat nothing but celery and tuna. And you can still be too pudgy. The truth is, it is not always easy to figure out which activities will have the greatest impact when you are trying to lose weight.
The same is true for your corporate lean program. No matter how diligently you lean out one part of a process, unless you can see the entire ripple effect across the whole system, the overall impact may be minimal or even nonexistent.
The only way to get truly get LEAN, as opposed to superficial “spot reduction”, is to understand and work the whole system.
Value Stream Mapping can be a great tool and a cornerstone of your lean program. For some projects it is a quick, effective, visual way to pin down specific bottlenecks and sources of waste. But it is not the only tool, or even the best one, for every situation. Some lean professionals seem to think they can shoe-horn every problem into a Value Stream Mapping framework. As the old saying goes, “Everything looks like a nail to the man who only has a hammer.”
Value Stream Mapping may be great for visualizing and analyzing relatively simple, straightforward manufacturing processes. After all, it was originally developed by Toyota specifically for automobile manufacturing problems. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to use it to adequately model a system that has:
- Variability
- Multiple product streams
- Shared resources
- Interdependencies
Most systems are simply too complex to model well with a two-dimensional, linear, paper-and-pencil tool. Trying to define a complex system by looking at a simple value stream map is like trying to understand a family just by looking at their family portrait. For more on where the static map falls down, see why value stream mapping can slow production and increase costs.
This is where value stream simulation comes in. By using ProcessModel for lean value stream simulation, you can build a deeper understanding of how to maximize value and minimize waste. It supports you at every stage of your lean program and quickly becomes the most valuable component in your toolkit. Use ProcessModel for:
- Mapping and simulating value streams
- Optimizing processes for customer value
- Creating both push and pull systems
- Perfecting proposed process changes before costly implementation
- Analyzing the impact of 5S implementation
- Kaizen blitz design
- Identifying multiple hotspots in complex systems
- Automatically exploring thousands of what-if scenarios
- Communicating current-state and future-state conditions and results
When the fat keeps moving, a static map will always be a step behind it. A working model of the whole system is what lets you see where the waste lands next, and act before it costs you. Take a closer look at the product to see it in motion.
