How to determine what you will work on, and what you won’t.

“If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” – Henry Ford

To have an effective business improvement system, an organization must ensure all process improvements aimed at waste elimination are closely tied to the company’s overarching business goals. This means linking individual action plans to company strategy – with every improvement contributing to the strategic objectives such as improved customer satisfaction, growth and return on investment.

Leaders at all levels are responsible for deploying the company’s strategy through the organization to the action plan level – ensuring that employees can clearly link their objectives to the company’s strategic goals.

In a Lean enterprise, action plan development and execution is a scientific process through which teams make changes to existing processes to drive improvements.

An action plan is a commitment to making change. It determines how, and if, each improvement initiative will support the strategy. In addition to listing specific changes, it has a defined outcome in mind. It is time-bounded, attainable, results-oriented and has a measurable outcome that can be checked and adjusted. Further, it requires the dedication of the right people, in the right quantity, with the right skills, for the right amount of time.

To develop a solid action plan, teams must first work to fully understand the problem, determining:

• The problem’s causes, which may include one or more of the eight types of waste: excess inventory, transportation, motion, waiting, over-processing, defects, overproduction and unused creativity.
• The problem’s effect on the customer, team and business.
• The desired outcome of the action plan: what the team wants to achieve and how it will impact the customer, team and overall business.
• Who should be involved in plan development.
• Who is responsible for plan deployment.
• How long it should take to achieve the goal.

For each action plan, a balance of measures and targets is needed. Ideally, daily progress should be measured in the areas of quality, delivery, inventory productivity and morale, in addition to safety.

Lean practitioners typically rely on value stream mapping to develop action plans. A core Lean tool, value stream mapping enables people to see opportunities for improvement. It involves the creation of a diagram that clearly depicts the flow of materials and information needed to take a product from order to delivery.

Developed in a cross-functional team-based workshop environment, value stream mapping enables employees to plot the current state, create a model of the future state, and develop an action plan to get there. It prioritizes what the team will work on and de-prioritizes what the team will not work on – ensuring all improvements support the company’s strategic goals, as quickly as possible and in a sustainable way.

While Lean disciples agree everything can be improved, it’s unrealistic to think that organizations have the time or resources available to improve everything, all the time. Therefore, it’s important to focus resources on the things that will quickly move the company closer to achieving its long-term objectives.

My October column talked about visual systems. Value stream mapping is an excellent example of an effective visual system. As Mike Rother and John Shook of the Lean Enterprise Institute discuss in their Shingo Prize-winning book, Learning to See, by using a workshop and a simple tool, people learn to see the value stream: all the processes required to bring a product from concept to launch, from order to delivery. In essence, value stream mapping is a simple way of communicating the value stream to employees. It’s meant to inspire those involved in the change.

Value stream mapping uses two maps. One shows the current state, the other, the team’s goal: a higher level of performance that will deliver results in support of the company’s overall strategy (Figure 1).


A workshop is the initial forum for value stream mapping. The workshop typically involves management and subject matter experts. Celestica often includes operations, supply chain management and customers in the Lean transformation. For a large-scale transformation, we may include every function that touches the end-to-end process, including representatives from logistics and the supply base.

Three considerations determine who is involved in value stream mapping:

• Where the most impactful bottlenecks reside.
• Where the most significant breakthroughs are required.
• Where the greatest opportunities for improvement exist.

Once the team is established, the first stage of value stream mapping is to understand which operations or processes require a breakthrough, or significant transformation. We consider these areas the bottlenecks, and the action plan is developed to drive breakthroughs in these areas.

Once we understand the current state, we can then develop a comprehensive view of the future state – typically six to nine months out – and our action plan to achieve it.

Typically, value stream mapping takes four weeks of planning. It involves assembling the right people, engaging in continuous communication, defining overall objectives and gathering data. Following this, three to five days are spent creating the value stream maps and action plan.

The maps are created using icons taped to large sheets of paper to show the flow of information and material, and the relationship between the flow of information and the flow of material. The scope of the map includes the customer (icon in the top right corner of the map) back to the supplier (icon in the top left corner). Between those icons, the upper half of the map shows the flow of information, while the lower half shows the flow of the product – from raw material to finished product. The map also contains processing information that helps reveal opportunities for improvement.

When completed, the maps are posted near the value stream to communicate with employees and build commitment toward action plan execution (Figure 1).

Once improvement priorities are established, the team can leverage the rest of Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) approach to drive the success of the plan:

• Plan: Develop an action plan using value stream mapping.
• Do: Using Kaizen and Six Sigma to make improvements, execute the action plan.
• Check: Check that the actions are sustainable and deliver the expected results based on the measurement metrics identified in the action plan.
• Adjust: Determine if any adjustments are necessary to the actions being taken.
• Anything that’s not effective should be adjusted. To determine whether changes are necessary, the team must ask itself: What did we learn about the actions we’re taking? Are they sustainable? Are they happening on time? Are they delivering the desired results?

To optimize action plan deployment and in turn achieve company strategy, it is important to understand the following considerations:

1. To truly understand the real situation on the manufacturing floor, management needs to go to the place the work is being carried out to observe progress. In Japanese, this is called genchi genbutsu. Roughly translated, this means “go and see at the actual place.” Genchi genbutsu is vital to the “planning” and “check to confirm results” aspects of the deployment process.

Often, numbers and data in reports don’t tell the whole story. The cause of a problem might be something different than management had originally presumed. Perhaps it’s poor ergonomics that’s driving quality issues and causing a bottleneck. Whatever the real cause of a manufacturing problem, genchi genbutsu helps identify these issues so that action plans target the real issues.

2. To achieve sustainable results, employees need to be the drivers of the action plan. Value stream mapping is an excellent tool that helps them to understand priorities, get involved in the plan’s execution, and most important, understand the role of their team or function in supporting the company’s strategy. By learning from successes and failures, they learn to develop and deploy more effective and attainable plans.

3. An organization’s customers benefit greatly from strong links between strategy and deployment. This is because the strategy, and action plans that drive it, always have the customer in mind. If your company is aligned and focused on moving the needle toward specific strategic objectives that improve efficiency and effectiveness, you’ll be better positioned to support customers’ needs.

4. Companies that don’t make the proper connection between strategy and action can face significant challenges. Resources may not be well allocated. Multiple internal teams may unknowingly be duplicating efforts – wasting energy and achieving two different outcomes or processes. Employees may be working on conflicting projects and goals and may be distracted by pet projects that do not support the strategy.

5. In a competitive and continually changing business landscape, effectively deploying strategy and sticking with action plans requires a great level of persistence and intestinal fortitude on the part of management.

In business, there is only constant change. Fluctuations occur in markets. An organization’s structure changes. Priorities shift. Customer needs evolve. While priorities can change based on what’s happening “now,” the focus must remain on executing the established plan. It’s a long-term process of determining what works and what does not.

When it comes to executing strategy, the definition of success is making improvements that drive the strategy; completing the plan; and of course, learning from the experience. Once the action plan is complete and results achieved, it’s time to celebrate and then start the process anew.

Robert Hemmant is global Lean architect at Celestica (celestica.com). His column appears bimonthly.

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