Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel can be achieved as we start shaping our future state. With shaping, being the key factor in this step of the process. We laid the foundation of this “Learning to See” series the June/July issue of Tracks and developed our current state map in the last issue. Now we need to develop a vision for where we want our organization to be and start shaping our future with the future state map.
With the current state map complete, we can now start working on the future map. As we previously discussed the future state, or where we want to be in our product flow, begins by ask several questions:

• Are there bottlenecks or constraints?
• What is Takt time?
• Where can inventory be reduced?
• Where can flow be improved?
• What other improvements can be required?

Considering these questions creates opportunities to get us to a future state. Let’s look at our current state map and make a few notes. This is where you will want to make several copies of the current state map and start brainstorming ideas for improvement.

The first thing that should stand out is the “queue” time versus the cycle time (C/T). Often we want to improve the time of the process step itself (cycle time). This may save us a few minutes here or there, but looking at the queue time provides great opportunity to eliminate non-value added time. Where we have 14 hours of process time (most of which is value added time), we have 60 hours of queue time which is almost all non-value added. Let’s go for what may give us the greatest impact, then we can go back later and work to perfect the process cycle time. 

To help determine where to start, we can use Takt time. “Takt” is a German word for the baton an orchestra conductor uses to regulate the speed, beat or timing of the musicians. Similarly, we are finding the beat of our production process. There are a few different ways to arrive at the Takt time, for this example we will look at total production time versus required production time, as in our example. This gives us the “beat” of this process which is 5.2 hours. With this we can go back and look at our queue times and any time over five hours provides an opportunity for improvement. Kaizen events will be used to make the changes. These events are short (one to three days) process improvement projects usually conduct by a selected team. They are represented by a bursting star on the value stream map. 

After a couple of changes to the current state map we decided to combine the assembly shop and finish shop, as well as the cut and weld areas. This will put operations previously handled by one individual each into a team environment. The teams create synergies and reduce processing time, but more importantly eliminates wasted queue time. Also, we have added some Point of Use Stock (POUS) areas to eliminate time wasted traveling to the warehouse. Overall, in this example we have reduced production time from 74 hours to 25 ½ hours. In other words, where it was taking almost two weeks to get a completed trailer out the door, we are now at about three days.

Developing these value stream maps are fundamental to understanding your product flow and eliminating waste and non-value added activities. As discussed previously in Going Lean-Understanding and Getting Started with Lean (April/May 2011) there are many Lean tools available. Understanding and applying those tools through value stream mapping is where significant gains can be made in your production and operations. We’ll discuss some of these various tools and strategies in future issues of Tracks.