When you have many things to improve in your products and services, it can be difficult to understand where to begin.
Process Improvement is an ongoing effort to address issues, and helps you make sure that you’re working on the issues that will have the biggest impact to your customers. Furthermore, you can use Value Stream Mapping as a key process improvement tool to help identify issues that impact your ability to get things done, and to develop effective improvement plans for your organization. It can also maximize the probability that the plans will actually get implemented and become meaningful and sustained improvements over the long-term.
Value Stream Mapping starts by creating families of similar products/services, then determining the steps and pace that the organization adheres to in order to meet customer demand. This helps get everything organized, allows you to map your current state process, and identifies the specific location of the problem. After you have identified the issue(s), tools from the Lean toolbox can help improve your workflow and ensure that your products and services get to your customers in a more efficient manner.