Extending Value Stream Mapping for Lean Production Planning and Control

Value Stream Mapping has been a key Lean tool since its publication in 1988, offering a strategic view on the reconfiguration of an organization’s processes to reduce overall lead time. It has since been used in many different domains beyond (car) manufacturing. However, the potential offered by its concise representation of both material flow and its controlling information flow seems to have been largely underused. Most literature reports on VSM in the context of waste detection and local improvements. VSM also supports redesigning the material flow (even on a supply chain level) towards (pure) pull systems. However, it fails to adequately give guidance on how to gradually evolve towards this ultimate ideal state. This paper wants to offer a significant contribution to practitioners on how to use VSM to bridge this gap. Another key challenge that remains largely unpublished is how to adapt the planning systems accordingly at each reconfiguration of the material flow. This paper presents extensions to the basic VSM tool to meet these challenges. It includes a more comprehensive 5-level hierarchy that allows to position most lean flow-related techniques. It also extends the basic “door-to-door” VSM with new symbols to accommodate these techniques into the map. Finally, it introduces a new set of 13 questions to support redesigning not only the material flow, but also the information flow. The resulting richer future state maps better support the gradual evolution towards a leaner future shop floor, as illustrated with an example.