Ken comes to TBD with 35 years experience in HR, Education, Training and OD in manufacturing, government, retail, automotive, healthcare, distribution, logistics and aerospace industries. Of those, he spent 19 years with Toyota as a Lean/TPS Consultant.
Jonena
Posted by: Ken Pilone
This past Christmas season, as I stared into our box of outdoor Christmas decorations, I pulled out our Christmas lights which had become a huge, tangled ball, intertwined with other decorations. Once I untangled the lights from the rest of the stuff, I eventually found a plug. When I plugged it in, some of the lights came on, others didn’t. Was this one string? Two? Three? It was hard to tell where one string ended and another began. Eventually, I was able to untangle and separate the strings. This is exactly what most value streams look like, a tangled ball of interconnected steps that eventually have an end point.
As I set out to straighten and hang the strings, the metaphor became even more clear to me. As I stood on tip toes on the top rung of my ladder, it hit me (this isn’t about safety now, is it?). A value stream is simply a set of activities that, when sequenced together, add value to a customer. These lights are like that, I thought. There’s a beginning point, the plug, and an end point where it either terminates or connects to another string.
The wire is necessary to move current from one light to the next but does it add value? Really? I mean, nobody will look at my house after I’m done decorating it and say, “Wow, nice wire!”. We even buy them so that the wire doesn’t stand out. My house trim is white, so I want to get white wire. So the goal is to hang them so attention is placed on the lights, not the wire, right? The wire represents ‘non-value added’ work. It’s necessary but the customer doesn’t really care about it. We buy products but aren’t interested in how they got to the store shelves.
My job as a consultant is to help my clients do exactly the same thing. Our goal together is to untangle their processes, determine which steps in it actually add value for the customer (the lights) and which don’t (the wire). Then we look at each value-added step and evaluate if it’s working the way we want. Put another way, we ask, ‘if this bulb burns out, does the rest of the string go out too?’. If not, ‘do we really need it?’. If so, what do we have to do to fix it?
What steps in your processes are not working properly? What is the impact on the customer? Are your value streams uncluttered and free of knots and tangles? What do your customers think?
To learn more about Lean thinking and how it's proven methodologies can improve your organization's processes, customer service and bottom line, contact our office. Our Lean experts are here to help you untangle your Value Streams today! 602-263-1961
