ABSTRACT
It may surprise some people, but all of the Lean concepts typically applied to manufacturing industries also apply to service organizations as well. The challenge is to be creative enough to figure out how to use them best to align work processes with customers’ expectations and make the lives of the staff a bit easier from day to day. In their landmark book Lean Thinking (1996), James Womack and Daniel Jones define a value stream as follows:
The set of all specific actions required to bring a specific product or service through the three critical management tasks of any business:
1. Problem solving (e.g., design) 2. Information management (e.g., order processing) 3. Physical transformation (e.g., converting raw materials to finished product)
Management of these value streams-Value Stream Management-involves a process for measuring, understanding, and improving and managing the flow and interactions of all the associated tasks to keep the cost, service, and quality of a company’s products and services as competitive as possible. More important, Value Stream Management sets the stage for implementing a Lean transformation throughout the whole enterprise and keeps an organization from falling back into the traditional suboptimal approach of improving departmental-level efficiencies. A basic but powerful two-dimensional tool of Value Stream Management is value stream mapping. It documents and directs a Lean transformation from a system, or big picture, perspective.
