What Comprises a System (All Systems)
A System and Value Streams. Value Streams make up a System, such as business, manufacturing, healthcare, military, or hospital. Processes make up Value Streams. Activities make up Processes.
What is a Value Stream
Consequently, all the processes that are needed to produce a product or service. are included in a Value Stream. Firstly, it starts with a customer order and ends at customer delivery. It is a holistic view of all processes and activities. You may ask yourself how come a Value Stream is important? When you think in terms of Value Streams rather than department outputs you have some distinctive advantages. A Value Stream tells you where to focus your attention to increase Value Stream performance. It comes with metrics that include the performance of every process in the Value Stream. It is the Value Stream performance that is important to your customers, not process performance. A Value Stream not only gives you a hint of performance but also measures quality through each process. This example is of a Building Permit Process.
The video below gives you an overview of the power of a Value Stream:
In Conclusion – Value Stream Map
The video above demonstrated the Map of a Value Stream. When you have a Value Stream Map then you know where to look to improve performance, the performance of every process, and the quality level of every process. Toyota has a map of virtually every Value Stream in their company. It feeds into Continuous Improvement, a critical competitive advantage for Toyota. If you run your system based on Value Streams, your system will be powered into the future and it will be a start towards Operational Excellence, and competitive advantage. Start building your Value Stream Maps today.