by Jim Womack, President of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI)

We understand this desire to find an expert teacher in lean techniques, but this shouldn’t be your first step. The best way to get started is a simple "self-assessment" walk. We advise the caller (let’s assume it’s you) to go to the gemba (the shop floor, the engineering area, the production control and order management department, i.e. where the rubber hits the road).

Once there, pick a product family from the customer end of the value stream, based on products that pass through similar processing steps and over common equipment in your downstream processes. Selecting the product family based on upstream fabrication steps that serve many product lines in a batch mode won’t give you what you need.

Once you’ve picked a product family, put yourself in the position of your customer and walk backwards to trace the design, order and physical product from launch back to original concept, from delivery back to the sale, and from finished product back to raw materials.

As you do this ask some very simple questions:

• Does this product provide the precise value sought by the customer? Partly this is a matter of delivering a defect-free item on time at a competitive price, but does the product really speak to the customer’s current and emerging value needs? Or is it a reflection of what the company wants to make with assets and an organization suited to the past? (It’s amazing how many manufacturing companies run backwards, taking their mission in life as working harder and harder to more efficiently provide customers those products the company most wants to make. When customers balk, manufacturers often focus on further cost cutting as a response, but improved efficiency won’t help for long if your value proposition is wrong.)

• Is the value stream for this product – that is, the actions currently required to design, order, and produce it -- mostly value creating? Answer this question objectively by putting yourself in the position of your customer. Simply: "Am I willing to pay for each of these activities?" No customer will ever say they want to pay for rework, storage, scrap, and unnecessary motions, yet these wasteful actions probably account for the great majority of effort along the value stream for your product!

• Do the design, the order, and the product flow continuously through the necessary activities to reach the customer? This question comes alive – often in a shocking way – when you simply add up the time required for all of the value creating activities and compare this to the time currently required to get from start to finish. Typically less than a third of the time currently needed to get through product development is value creating, and the value-creating fraction of order processing and production time is often below one percent! The rest of the time is for backtracking, rework, and waiting.

• Can the customer pull this product from the value stream – that is, can the customer get just what they want, when they want it, without your firm holding a mountain of finished goods just in case? Many firms are now diving into e-commerce with fancy websites backed up by massive finished goods or parts warehouses and wildly gyrating schedules running back upstream to manufacturing and suppliers (e.g., Amazon.com and Webvan.com.). With sufficient effort and enough inventories, customers may consistently get what they want when they want it, although we are skeptical. We remember Taiichi Ohno of Toyota’s famous aphorism, "the more inventory you have on hand the less likely you are to have the one item your customer actually wants." But even if the customer gets good service, can any company letting customers "pull" in this manner hope to make money?

• Is the performance of this value stream steadily improving? Is value being continuously rethought in response to the customer? Are wasted steps being continually removed? Is the velocity of the design, order, and object continually increasing? Is customer response continually getting faster and more accurate? In other words, are your managers moving steadily toward perfection – the happy state when you can provide pure value to your customer with zero waste?

• Who is in charge of the value stream for each product? If your products are orphans wandering as best they can through a functional organization, we urge you to assign a value stream manager for each product. No amount of lean technical assistance will make much difference if there is no one for a sensei to work with. To have any success the value stream manager’s vision and authority must extend across departmental boundaries to make things happen, regardless of the organizational structure. Who will stand behind value stream managers when their actions start to create stress in your organization? We call this person the change agent, the manager at whatever level who leads the charge for change. How about you?

• Where is it most useful to start? If your value stream walk shows that reliable customer response is your most pressing problem, perhaps you should be working on Total Productive Maintenance and six sigma quality. Reducing set-up times or cellularizing processing activities may be irrelevant or even impossible until you deal with process capability issues. The key point is to start with activities the customer will immediately benefit from, not with initiatives that are technically intriguing or exhilarating for managers!