Page 61 - The Toyota Way Fieldbook

Chapter 3. Starting the Journey of Waste Reduction 39

There have been a number of books building on Learning to See. Kevin Duggan,
in Mixed Model Value Streams (Productivity Press, 2002), presents in a similar for-
mat how to map a process in which there is a great deal of variety in your prod-
ucts and they have different cycle times—for instance, variation in the amount
of time needed to machine parts for different products. And for improving
repetitive business-office processes, Beau Keyte and Drew Locher, in The
Complete Lean Enterprise (Productivity Press, 2004), work through a case in a sim-
ilar way to Learning to See, except the case is a business process instead of a man-
ufacturing process.

TIP
Management Must Lead Value Stream Improvement
Use teams led by high-level managers to do your mapping. Value
stream mapping can be narrowly viewed as a technical tool to
design your lean system. But the real power is as an organizational
intervention to get the right people to become dissatisfied with the
waste in their system, develop a shared, realistic vision for the
future, and develop an action plan they are enthusiastic about. A
well-facilitated two to four day workshop can have wondrous
results. The workshop should have all the key functional spe-
cialists represented who are touched by the process. It could be
facilitated by a lean expert but in terms of content should be led
by a high-level manager. The manager should be someone with
responsibility and authority over all the main processes in the value
stream being worked on. In many cases that means the plant
manager. Some companies have organized by product family
with “value stream managers,” and they are the obvious candi-
dates to be the content leaders for the workshop.

We will not try to teach value stream mapping in this book. However, we
would like to share a number of tips we have learned in teaching and doing value
stream mapping:
1. Use the current state map only as a foundation for the future state map.
We are so excited about fixing individual processes when we look at the
current state map with all the waste revealed that we want to immediate-
ly go to work attacking the waste. Fixing problems in the current value
stream simply brings us back to point kaizen (see “Trap: Fixing Problems
in the Current Value Stream”). You do not get true flow. The power of lean
is in the future state system.