Value Stream Mapping – Continuing Down the Path of Lean!

Crafts Technology had the honor of hosting John L. Van Fossen, Raymond Harvey, and Brett Hibbard for a two-day Value Stream Mapping of a couple of key products. This Hyperion’s Kaizen team has decades of experience conducting and implementing Lean Manufacturing.

Lean Manufacturing determines the value of a process and eliminates waste or inefficiencies in said process. As a core value, Hyperion strives to learn and grow every day. Our Crafts team bought this core value and brought it into our Value Stream Mapping event.

Value Stream Mapping is breaking down your process into value-added operations and non-value-added operations. The goal of a Lean Value Stream Mapping event is to minimize non-value-added time, as opposed to maximizing value-added time. As Crafts is relatively early on in our Lean Journey, learning how to properly map our processes is very important. Mapping the process helped us not only identify wastes and inefficiencies but quantify them with data. Quantifying the wastes helps aim our future state process by targeting the desired lead time and inventory reduction goal we set. We have the data, we created the plan, and now it’s time to execute. Just do it.

During the event, our cross-functional team gained valuable insight into the overall manufacturing process and determined the optimum future state. This is only the beginning, there will be more to come; Crafts will learn to lean and continue to grow.