Developed by Mike Rother and John Shook (Learning to See, 1999).
Draws the whole flow of material and information from customer order back to raw input, separating time that adds value from waiting, moving, and rework.
When to reach for it
When an end-to-end process is slow or costly and each department has tuned its own part without seeing the whole.
How it runs
- Pick one product family or service line to follow.
- Walk the flow from customer request back to first input.
- Draw the current state in standard symbols, with inventory and information flows.
- Total the processing time against the full lead time.
- Mark the waste and draw a future state without it.
- Plan the changes that move the flow toward that future state.
Where it sits in SOLVE eX
Go to the source
- Learning to See: Value-Stream Mapping to Add Value and Eliminate Muda, Lean Enterprise Institute, 1999