A One-Two Punch: Value Stream Mapping and A3 Thinking

Combine two of the most popular and effective methods of Lean Thinking to improve your performance improvement results: Value Stream Mapping and A3 Thinking.  Learn techniques for mapping your business processes, developing improvement plans, and systematically improving toward your performance goals.

Value Stream Mapping (2 days):

Value Stream Mapping is a graphical technique for describing the material and information flows needed to bring a product or service through a sequence of operations and into the hands of customers.  Developed by Toyota, mapping the current and future states of a process helps you to see waste, identify root causes, describe target performance, and to develop solid improvement plans.

Value Stream Mapping has been used across a wide range of industries as a way to develop and communicate process improvement strategies.  In this workshop, you will learn:

• Background and tips for Value Stream Mapping
• Techniques of Current State Mapping
• Methods for visualizing the Future State of a process
• Developing improvement plans
• Applications of Value Stream Mapping to office and service processes

The two-day VSM workshop includes videos, real-world examples, and hands-on exercises.

Closing the gap between Current and Future State Value Stream Maps is typically done with a series of improvement projects.  These projects often use the A3 Report format to structure them in a logical format that helps grow systematic problem solving skills.

A3 Thinking (1 day):

Learn how to strengthen your systematic process improvement efforts with A3's.

The A3 Report is a Toyota-pioneered practice of getting the problem, analysis, and corrective action plan written onto a single (A3, or 11x17 size) piece of paper.  When used correctly, A3's can summarize problem solving exercises, status reports, and strategic plans.  They describe the stepwise logic from problems to solutions, making the thinking visible, and helping to coach and develop systematic problem solving capabilities.

In this one-day workshop, participants will be introduced to the A3 format, and will use the structure on classroom applications, developing the systematic thinking skills needed to apply them to real world problems.

In this workshop, you will learn:

• The basic A3 Report structure, and its derivatives
• Linking Value Stream Maps and A3's
• Hands-on applications and examples of A3's
• Coaching tips for developing systematic problem solving skills (A3 Thinking)

This workshop is available as either the full 3-day VSM+A3 workshop, or the 2-day VSM portion only.  Price includes continental breakfast and lunch daily.