How to Draw a Value Stream Map

A Value Stream Map consists of two maps—one is for the present or current state, and the other one is for the future state vision. Before you start to draw the Value Stream Map (VSM), ensure that you are familiar and have a list of the symbols needed in order to draw an effective VSM. Once you have that covered, it’s time to start drawing the Current Value Stream Map.

1) Start by drawing the supplier, customer and production control icons. When drawing the customer icons, also outline their requirements for each day and each month.
- It is also necessary to calculate the daily production and the container requirements.

2) Draw both the inbound and outbound shipping icon and truck icon in the appropriate places, with the frequency of the deliveries per day, per week, per month, etc.

3) Now start adding in the process boxes in the sequence that they occur—from left to right.

- Add in data boxes below the process boxes to fill in with data after you’ve finished drawing the rest of the map

4) Add in the communication arrows, with the corresponding notes and frequency of communication.

5) Gather the elements of the process and input them into the data boxes below the process boxes.

- Add the operator symbols into the process boxes.

6) Add the inventory locations and the levels used each day.

- Add the graph at the bottom of the VSM

7) Draw the push, pull and FIFO icons (these will go between the process boxes).

8) Add any other information icons that will be useful in capturing the whole process.

9) Add in all the hours worked, cycle and lead times.

- Calculate the current total cycle time and lead times

- The bottom graph is where you would input the cycle and lead times.

When drawing the Current Value Stream Map is highly recommended to draw it where the product is made, walking through the whole process as it is drawn. This will help to ensure that nothing is missed, plus things may be seen that occur within the process that could be missed if the drawing is done away from the actual processes. This link describes how this is done step by step.

With any tool, it is not fail-proof, thus the developers of the value stream map need to ensure that all components of the process are depicted, or there will be holes in evaluating the process in order to truly expose and eliminate waste.
You can use tools like MS Visio(2007) to draw a successful VSM. Again, it is important to understand that tools alone will not make any difference.

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