Tags: Value stream mapping

Even the best organizations don’t see outside their four walls sometimes, and those in search of the big picture often turn to value-stream mapping. As a tool in the lean transformation arsenal, value-stream mapping is a tried-and-true approach to finding bottlenecks, redundancies and other problems in the product or service’s journey to the end customer. What far too few companies realize, however, is that value-stream mapping can be a great catalyst for changing leadership behavior to support and sustain a lean culture.

Value stream mapping has been widely used in the manufacturing industry to understand flow. Our MBOE students learned how value stream mapping can be effectively used in a pharmacy setting using a case based on Giant Eagle’s pharmacy, authored by Gary Butler, pictured.

Google “value stream map” and you’ll get about 5 million hits. You can read as much as you want on it, but the only way to truly learn is by doing one – and in my experience, you learn more with each new map. Learning to See, co-authored by lean guru John Shook, gave our MBOE students this past week a prime on the value stream map, and in class, they learned much more about the five components to one: Customer, Supplier, Process Steps, Process Metrics and Information Flow.