North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
North America's Largest Metal Forming, Fabricating, Welding and Finishing Event
Mike Osterling, Sr. Consultant, Osterling Consulting, Inc. was nice enough to participate in a special Q&A for our blog this week to give us a preview of his session at FABTECH: Value Stream Mapping: Differences Between the Office and Shop Floor. Learn more about the session here and check out the Q&A below.
Can you describe how Value Stream Mapping (VSM) might be applied in a production environment marked by low-volume, high-mix work? Let’s begin by pointing out that the front office processes (order taking and management) for low-volume, high-mix production processes are much more complex than the front office processes for high-volume low-mix environments – thereby meaning those value streams are in much greater need of VSM alignment! So we need to start those VSMs at the receipt of order (or at receipt of a request for quote), and we need to include leaders from those areas in the actual VSM activity. In some cases we can identify VS product families if there are products that are different, but they go through common production processes. In those situations, there may be opportunities to create areas of flow (or mini-flow). In other cases, the variation is so grand that we don’t have that luxury. Regardless, in high-mix environments we need to work on information flow and creation of pull systems (which are not necessarily kanban systems).
How can VSM help in non-production areas? In reality, it is only on rare occasion when a complete value stream map would not touch non-production areas. Since a value stream is defined as including all the steps from request to delivery of a good or service, groups such as sales, customer service, engineering, documentation control, scheduling and materials are critical elements of customer-facing value streams. And in most organizations we see an abundance of problems as the work passes through these different departments. Missing and inaccurate information being passed on from one group to the other. Redundancies or missed steps. Finger pointing when problem surface. And more often than not, each department has a very limited understanding of what problems the other departments are facing – and no one is responsible for creating linkages or flow across the value stream. Some of the goals of value stream mapping include: getting a common understanding by departmental leaders of where these disconnects are as the “thing” goes through the value stream; and building alignment on what they should do about it. A completely different type of “non-production” areas exist – those processes that may never directly come in contact with the external-customer value stream. Examples include the new-hire process, product development, or capital acquisition process. Though these processes are different than production, they can benefit from the same type of value stream mapping approach by gaining alignment of the different silo’ed departments that these processes go through.
What tips can you provide to ensure success using VSM in these non-production areas? Acknowledge that when people say “we are different” that they are correct – and adapt if necessary to accommodate those differences. That being said, the principles are the same! So how do we adapt? In some cases it may be the vocabulary, or words we use. For example, when talking about quality in a production environment we often use words such as “first pass yield” – using the term “first pass yield” for an office process may cause some team members to tune out. But if we adapt and use “percent complete and accurate” (what percent of the time does the downstream process receive all the information they require, the information they receive is correct, and does not require additional clarification”) people will relate and engage. Another example of the need to adapt is in the questions we ask regarding the design of the future state. Those who have value stream mapped production processes recognize the value of understanding concepts such as take time and pull systems – those “tools” may or may not be relevant for some office processes. When designing future state value streams we may need to adapt the questions we ask. Of course there are many other differences as well with regards to how we “walk the value stream”, the questions we ask as we walk the value stream and in the identification of barriers to flow.
FABTECH 2024
About the Expo
North America's largest metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing event heads to Orange County Convention Center in October 2024. FABTECH provides a convenient "one stop shop" venue where you can meet with world-class suppliers, see the latest industry products and developments, and find the tools to improve productivity, increase profits and discover new solutions to all of your metal forming, fabricating, welding and finishing needs.
