Value Stream Mapping and its Place in Our Company

Value stream mapping is a process of streamlining and making our company more efficient. Often in a company we will see people following the same process without thinking about it because that is just the way it has always been done. Over time this process becomes the work process that everyone in the company follows and thinks nothing about. But we recently took a step back and evaluated the process from an outside standpoint, and what we found was pretty astonishing. We realized that there many inefficiencies in our current process, and there are many little things we can change to make our operations run much quicker. Our LEAN initiative is our mission to burn off the unnecessary habits and actions of our former work process to maximize our efficiency as Marvin Keller’s hub of operations.

We talked to Amy Graven our Driver Manager Supervisor to get an idea of this process and how it looks in our company now. She says,

“Yes, we are currently evaluating at the work process that we have in place and seeking ways we can cut back on the intensive work load that may be unnecessary. We want to hopefully find areas in our process where we are doing unnecessary double and sometimes triple work and find a more efficient solution. We want to cut back on many things and even eliminate some unnecessary processes all together. We also want to simply our process, creating a standardized process for everyone to follow. Right now in our current state we found that there are a lot of hand offs, a lot of double, triple checking, a lot of different people doing the same things multiple times. Our streamlining process is a part of the LEAN initiative to weed out the unnecessary parts of our work process.”