When John Shook worked at Toyota he noticed that the senior experts on the Toyota Production System often drew simple maps when on the shop floor. These maps showed the current physical flow of a product family and the information flow for that product family as they wound through a complex facility making many products.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 8 reviews)

Great text for learning VSM

I teach value stream mapping as part of an overall masters level operations management class. I use this text as the primary document on VSM. It's an excellent text that one can learn the basics from. The text would be further enhanced if it included an enclosed DVD/video (or access to such via the web) that further explained the content with examples. I believe a 1 hour (maybe less) video would significantly enhance the learning of the material, with very little increase in unit cost.
November 11, 2008

The Best Value Stream Instruction Book ever written...

This is THE VSM book for people wanting to learn Value-stream mapping. Although it is a bit expensive, it is well worth it. I recommend this book to every Business Process Improvement class I teach and have never received anything but positive feedback from the people who have purchased it. This book teaches you how to "think lean" by showing you how to work through a simple project and manually draw out VSM's.

The Lean Institute [...] is a wealth of Lean and Value-stream information, and has additional resources that can help you on your way to becoming an expert Lean process analyst.

Once you have learned to draw VSM's manually and need a better (and faster) way, I recommend iGrafx software, as it uses the same methodology, terminology and objects that you will learn in this treasure of a book.

October 08, 2008

Learning to draw valuestream diagrams!

Book info : 3rd edition published in 2003.
Pre required knowledge: SMED, Continuous Flow Manufacturing
Purchased price : USD 17,50

This book is a workbook, it does not handle a lot of theoretical stuff on LEAN. Also it relies on SMED and Continuous flow manufacturing and KANBAN, so if you're not familiar with that, you will need to do some reading on those topics as well.

Basically this book gives you a technique how do draw you current value stream with all the necessary details. Next it explains how to draw your future value stream and what to do to get there (on paper and on the shop floor). Be careful it does not say how to get there

The book is not very complicated and the way it is explained every fool can do the trick. What I found pity was that the majority of the book goes on the production process. It does not say a lot on the office value stream. Still, I can recommend this book to everybody that is looking for a practical starter on LEAN.

October 22, 2006

So you want to learn how to map the value stream?

This is definitely THE starter book to learn vsm. Yes more examples would help, and yes so much information is covered by such little prose. The more I learn and practice lean, The more I am convinced of the importance in using value stream mapping to insure that the lean implementation process benefits the value stream (the so called critical path of the production process).
This key concept is where Six Sigma fails, and that is how do you select a Six Sigma Project that is going to impact the value stream?
The authors almost dare you to work through the ONE example you are to analyze on your own but LEARNING TO SEE starts you on the way to becoming a lean sensei.
STUDY STUDY STUDY this book.
November 22, 2004

Customer Review

This book is written just like a book on lean manufacturing should be: short, to the point, and no crap. It's very informative, easy to read, a no academic wishy-washy stuff. A great buy!
August 16, 2004

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