Product Marketing System » Value Stream Mapping

Value Stream Concepts

admin — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 13:55:00 +0000

Jim Luckman has had the unique experience of leading three separate lean transformations, as a Plant Manager, as a Director of a Research and Development Center, and as a CEO of a small start-up company. During the podcast, we discussed Value Stream Mapping and delved into Value Stream Concepts as they applied to Lean and Agile Software Development. I found it interesting his take on the "Newer" Lean concepts and how they are viewed by a more traditional practitioner.

Jim is the Past President and CEO of iPower Technologies, a company serving the distributed generation market of electrical power. Luckman has worked in the auto industry for 34 years working at Delphi Automotive (formerly part of General Motors). Jim current efforts include leadership coaching, application of lean in R&D and application of lean to software development. He currently coaches companies interested in company-wide lean transformation. Jim is a partner in Lean Transformations Group, LLC

Jim will be the instructor for this LEI Workshop in Indianapolis on June 22nd – Value-Stream Mapping for the Office and Service: This interactive workshop demonstrates how to apply value-stream mapping, a fundamental and critical tool, to address what many companies find difficult to do: making a fundamental change in business processes such as administrative, professional, and transactional activities. You will see how the key elements of lean thinking and value-stream mapping apply to such activities by identifying key processes to tackle, drawing an accurate current-state map of each process, applying lean principles to envision a leaner future-state for each process, and implementing the future-state in a way that can be sustained.

Kanban discussion with David Anderson, eBook

admin — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 13:00:00 +0000

David Anderson, author of the recent book, Kanban appeared on the Business901 podcast and added 50 minutes of Kanban discussion. This is a transcription of the podcast. David is a thought leader in managing highly effective software teams. He is President of David J. Anderson & Associates, based in Seattle, Washington, a management consulting firm dedicated to improving leadership in the IT and software development sectors.

Kanban –

His first book, Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results, published in 2003 by Prentice Hall, introduced many ideas from Lean and Theory of Constraints in to software engineering. David can be found at AgileManagement.net

The Guiding Principles of Value Stream Marketing

admin — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:24:00 +0000

On my podcast the other week, I had Robert Martichenko of LeanCor co-author of the Lean Enterprise Institute’s newest lean workbook, Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream. The book builds on the concepts of waste, flow, and pull. This workbook illustrates how to analyze the traditional supply chain as a flowing stream of products and information. Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream provides the steps to a comprehensive, real-life implementation process for optimizing your entire fulfillment stream from raw materials to customers.

In the podcast Robert states that a set of guiding principles must be adhered to or simple chaos may result. Following his lead and using the Lean Fulfillment Guiding Principles for an outline, I developed a set of guiding principles for the Value Stream Marketing. An explanation follows:

Most companies have a process that moves prospects and customers through a progression such as a marketing funnel or a sales pipeline. This enables an organization to visual the process and give them an idea of how many sales are close to closing or how many people are entering the funnel or even how many are maybe A, B or C players.

The movement is rather complex and could cross many different marketing channels. At the end of the progression, a certain number of prospects become customers and the others are kept in our pipeline till they remove themselves. We even will attempt to enlist referrals, especially from our customers to put more people into the pipeline. This accumulation of prospects makes it difficult for business to understand the progression of their prospects and maybe even their marketing efforts.

Organizations must come to understand that they are building a value stream. Effective management of the pipeline is one of the most critical components in marketing today. Finding the obstacles that hinder flow creates one of the most cost-effective ways of increasing sales. A Marketing Value Stream can be very long and continuously changing. It is almost impossible for managers to evaluate every action taken with detailed analysis. Instead you must create a set of guiding principles that you take for fact and adhere to them. A set of guiding principles for Value Stream Marketing are:

1. Eliminate all the waste in the value stream: Creating flow in the value stream requires all departments and functions in an organization to work in harmony. Focus on the fundamental lean principle of eliminating waste.

2. Make marketing efforts visible to all members of the value stream through a Marketing Kanban: If marketing efforts are visible across the stream, then it is much easier for every participant to plan work.

3. Increase throughput: When a company can increase throughput to the point where it can exceed expectations of the customer, your marketing cycle times are reduced when work in process (number of prospects) in the cycle is reduced.

4. Establish a Marketing Cadence and create level flow: The ultimate goal is to have information move in a predictable, consistent, and uninterrupted manner based on the actual demand of the prospect or customer. This is known as level flow. Level flow reduces variation in processes and tries to spread activities equally over working time. This minimizes the peaks and valleys in movement that create unevenness and overburden, which result in waste.

5. Use pull systems: Pull Marketing systems are a way of introducing the value(achieve) that a prospect /customer would recognize by your involvement(access) within their communities(attract). These 3 levels of engagement evolved to a simple term of Pull Marketing. These three levels of Pull have been wonderfully described in the recent book, The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion. The authors defined these terms as Access, Attract and Achieve.

6. Increase velocity and reduce variation: Velocity is the speed with which information and material move through the value stream. Meeting customer/prospect demand by delivering marketing efforts more frequently increases velocity. This helps to reduce work in process and lead times, which allows you to more easily adjust delivery to meet actual customer requirements.

7. Collaborate and use process discipline: The collaboration of all participants in a value stream is necessary to identify problems in the stream, determine root causes, and develop appropriate countermeasures. To be truly effective, this collaboration must be combined with standard improvement processes and regular PDCA.

What principles do you have in creating a Value Stream in your marketing?

Marketing Kanban 103, The Marketing Calendar

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 16:14:00 +0000

The next step I use in developing a Marketing Kanban is to develop a Marketing Calendar. The quickest way to learn about an organization’s marketing is simply create a visual Marketing Calendar. Look at how we do it:

When you think about your present marketing efficiencies, does your thoughts wander this direction:

It’s not working, it’s that simple. You are assigning responsibilities, deadlines and tasks, but it is just a headache to keep up. The most apparent problem: tasks are not getting handed off well or at the wrong time to others. Another problem may be, everyone’s priorities seem all mixed up, and one or two people or departments seem to be a enormous bottleneck.

If you are going to start creating a Value Stream, you have to first identify the tactics that you are presently using. This is made up of the events, advertising, social media efforts and other marketing related tools. It seems like such a simple step but in actuality you are creating your current state map. It would be terrible to start anything without knowing where you are at. Don’t you think?

P.S. That Calendar sure looks like a Kanban Board!

Lean Rock Stars assembled for Indy Management Workshop

admin — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:45:00 +0000

I have first hand knowledge of several of these instructors and the ones that I do not are well renowned in the Lean field. I can hardly think of a better cast that could be put together. I wonder if Lean Enterprise will put together a film clip like this for these Rock Stars? I think they should.

Lean Enterprise Institute recently announced 6 Lean Management Workshops for Indianapolis. The training sessions will help Lean Thinkers launch and sustain lean transformations in manufacturing and nonmanufacturing processes. The nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute will run workshops June 22-24, 2010, in Indianapolis on how to implement and sustain lean management methods in manufacturing, service, and office processes. The sessions, which will run from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Hyatt Regency Indianapolis, address how to apply basic and more advanced lean concepts. The lean management workshops and the instructors are listed below:

Key Concepts of Lean – Understanding the Toyota Production System – Instructor(s): David Meier

Managing to Learn: The Use of the A3 Management Process – Instructor(s): John Y. Shook, David Verble, Marek Piatkowski, Tracey Richardson

Value-Stream Mapping for the Office and Service – Instructor(s): Jim Luckman

Change Agent Skills for Lean Implementation Leaders – Instructor(s): David Verble

Lean Problem Solving Instructor(s): Tracey Richardson

Optimizing Flow in Office and Service Processes – Instructor(s): Drew Locher

Technorati Tags: Lean Workshops,Indianapolis Workshops,LEI,Lean Enterprise,Value Stream Mapping

Kanban Scheduling for Marketing?

admin — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 15:27:40 +0000

Kanban scheduling can be simply stated as demand scheduling. In Kanban, the products are produced based on actual usage rather than a forecasted usage. Therefore, a Kanban scheduling process to be considered a true Kanban the production process it controls must:

Only produce product to replace the product consumed by its customer
Only produce product based on signals sent its customers

The Kanban schedule replaces the traditional weekly or daily production schedule most of us have become familiar with in manufacturing operations. This schedule is replaced with visual signals and predetermined decision rules that allow the production operators to schedule the line. Think of Kanban scheduling as an execution tool rather than a planning tool. Kanban replaces the daily scheduling activities necessary to operate the process and the need for supervisors to continuously monitor scheduled status to determine the next item needed. This is done all through visual signals within the Kanban.

Why would you want to implement Kanban?
Kanban is a tool that controls your work in process. In marketing that would be your number of prospects within your Value Stream. Most organizations fail to recognize the hidden costs in overhead, effort, lost prospects that were never prospects, support material, and other service related activities. Work in process reductions together with these factors can make Kanban a competitive edge in today’s business environment. The benefits of Kanban can become a driver for creating a culture of continuous process improvement when the improvements are translated directly into work in process.

Just reducing the work in process forces you to better understand your marketing value Stream. It forces you to recognize how that marketing value stream relates target customer and how they need to be segmented for more focused efforts. When you are forced to constrict the numbers of organizations or individuals that you are dealing with, you will be reminded of the comfort levels and informal walls that allowed these levels to be build up over time. An added plus is that you will start using much more realistic data to formulate these decisions. It is not easy to say that you will stop marketing to a certain segment or group.

In many marketing processes it is more about growing the sales funnel with leads, which in lean terms is overproduction. The very nature of Kanban scheduling process sets up maximum and minimum work in process levels. These levels should be controlled by setting up control points, setting up for better sales channels (segmentation) provide directions for moving the process forward. The Kanban also gives individuals much better guidance on what is needed and just in its nature will allow better utilization of your human resources. It will also readily identify the constraints and bottlenecks within your process.

These levels can also signal for when and when not to accelerate marketing actions. You avoid the issue of should you or shouldn’t you increase targeted efforts in very various stages of your marketing process.

As a result of this, it will improve the flow of the entire sales and marketing process needed and who it needs to be directed at. Controlling these levels should also create shorter flow cycles that will prevent you from working on activities or creating material that is becomes dated or obsolete.

How do you start?
One of the best ways to learn and start implementing Kanban if it does indeed have all these fantastic benefits is to do it on a personal level first. My guest tomorrow on the Business901 Podcast is Jim Benson, the founder of Personal Kanban. In addition, this week’s blogging will talk about implementing a Marketing Kanban.

Therefore, a Marketing Kanban scheduling process to be considered a true Kanban the marketing process it controls must:

Only produce material/services that add value to the customer decision making process for their established need.
Only produce material/services based on signals sent from your customers

Related Posts:

Wasteful even in Sales and Marketing

Kanban, A Great Organizational Idea

Why you should use Kanban in Marketing?

Background for this post came from the book Kanban Made Simple