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Making the whole system visible to improve flow, inventory, and customer outcomes

The goal of any business is simple: maximise value creation for the customer.

The challenge is that most organisations don’t operate as a single system. They operate as a collection of functions, each optimising its own targets. Production focuses on output. Finance focuses on cost. Sales focuses on revenue. Individually, teams may be achieving their KPIs, yet the end-to-end performance experienced by the customer is far lower.

That gap is the cost of departmental thinking.

Value Stream Mapping is used to make the system visible and as a key input into where inventory is positioned and production planning flows.

What Value Stream Mapping actually shows

Value Stream Mapping is one of the most effective tools for understanding how work truly flows through a business. It brings together the only flows that matter:

Information flow
How demand enters the organisation and is translated into plans, schedules, approvals, and instructions. This reveals how work is prioritised, communicated, and often delayed before anything physical happens.

Material flow
How raw materials, work-in-progress, and finished goods move through value-adding activities. This exposes where inventory accumulates, where flow breaks down, and where capacity is misaligned.

Decision flow
Often overlooked, but critical. This looks at how decisions, approvals, clarifications, and changes move through the business. Slow or unclear decision-making can destroy flow just as quickly as physical bottlenecks. Together, these flows provide a clear picture of how the system actually operates, not how it is assumed to operate.

Why Value Stream Mapping works

A value stream map forces the organisation to step through the process end to end and ask a simple but confronting question at each stage:

Is this activity adding value for the customer, or is it waste?

As part of this process, the map captures:

• Time spent on each activity

• Waiting and lag time between steps

• Throughput and capacity constraints

• Inventory and WIP accumulation points

• Handoffs, rework, and feedback loops

Once the current state is visible, improvement opportunities become much clearer. Non-value-adding work can be removed, value-creating activities strengthened, and flow deliberately redesigned.

From a supply chain and planning perspective, Value Stream Mapping is particularly powerful because it highlights where inventory and WIP sit today, where they should sit, and how pull-based systems with controlled upper and lower limits can be established.

Value Stream Mapping as a strategic input

Many organisations use Value Stream Mapping too late.

The map is created after budgets are set and strategies are locked in. It then reveals the need for automation, additional planning capability, layout changes, supplier integration, or reliability upgrades. By that point, funding decisions have already been made, and improvement is deferred.

The result is a map that looks good on the wall, but changes little.

Value Stream Mapping is most effective when it is used before strategy and budgeting decisions are finalised.

Done at the right time, it provides leaders with:

• A clear current-state diagnostic

• A validated future-state design

• A prioritised view of improvement and investment opportunities

• Clarity on where and why flow breaks down

• A customer-focused lens before committing capital and resources

Used this way, it sharpens strategy, strengthens budgets, and aligns teams around the system rather than individual functions.

How we use Value Stream Mapping

Evan uses Value Stream Mapping selectively and purposefully. It is not treated as a standalone workshop or a theoretical Lean exercise.

The focus is on:

• Understanding how information, materials, and decisions flow today

• Identifying where inventory is masking deeper problems

• Designing a future state that supports service, flow, and cash objectives

• Translating insights into practical improvement priorities

The output is not a poster. It is a decision making input that supports planning, investment, and operational improvement.

When Value Stream Mapping is most valuable

Value Stream Mapping is particularly effective when organisations are:

• Experiencing high inventory and poor service simultaneously

• Struggling with planning instability or excessive expediting

• Preparing for strategic change or capital investment

• Trying to align supply chain, operations, and finance decisions

Next step

Value Stream Mapping is not about documenting process for its own sake. It is about creating clarity so better decisions can be made.

If you’re looking to use Value Stream Mapping to improve flow, inventory outcomes, and strategic alignment, I’m happy to talk through how I approach it and where it adds the most value.