Hi all,
I am an Industrial engineer and recently graduated. I work in a company that manufactures farm machinery equipments like Grain carts, Grain Drills, and other seed handling equipments. Now i am the only industrial engineer in my company so i get a very little or u can say no help or guidance in my field. I started off with many lean projects like Kaizen, VSM, simulation etc, but were unsuccessful and left incomplete since my company wanted me to concentrate on quality issues first. But now again i want to complete those projects and i want to start with VSM. I have read various articles, books and publications on VSM and have the theoretical knowledge but lack the implementation part of it. I dont understand where to start from. The reason is because our company has wide variety of products and each product have different assemblies which in futher has different subassemblies. Like the example of Grain drills you have the big frames, gear box drives, fertilizer drives, weldments, grain boxes, press wheels, opener assemblies etc which has to get assembled to form 1 single product. And we do all the activities right from FAbrication, Welding, painting and assembling.
So my question is what should be my product family, the whole drill or its sub-assemblies, and should i do an integrated VSM to incorporate all the station or individual VSM station to station.

I would really be thankful if someone could help me in this. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Knowing where to start

I find to answer your question, I need to ask some!
My opening statement is, what you pick should be customer end focused, and start there!
So,

What is the scope you want to hit, why?
You mentioned your time on quality issues, is there customer driven CAR or PAR, or even a process that is outstanding that would benefit?
What is the over all scope, plan of direction, goals from upper management,
What are the perceived heavy loss areas, or high waste areas?
What does the hard data say these are? Is it accurate?

I always go to the low hanging fruit. What process or area is the most congested or in need of fixing? You could go after through the quality part but I'm like Dante.... his questions are on point as to the direction to pursue.:D

Hi all,
I am an Industrial engineer and recently graduated. I work in a company that manufactures farm machinery equipments like Grain carts, Grain Drills, and other seed handling equipments. Now i am the only industrial engineer in my company so i get a very little or u can say no help or guidance in my field. I started off with many lean projects like Kaizen, VSM, simulation etc, but were unsuccessful and left incomplete since my company wanted me to concentrate on quality issues first. But now again i want to complete those projects and i want to start with VSM. I have read various articles, books and publications on VSM and have the theoretical knowledge but lack the implementation part of it. I dont understand where to start from. The reason is because our company has wide variety of products and each product have different assemblies which in futher has different subassemblies. Like the example of Grain drills you have the big frames, gear box drives, fertilizer drives, weldments, grain boxes, press wheels, opener assemblies etc which has to get assembled to form 1 single product. And we do all the activities right from FAbrication, Welding, painting and assembling.
So my question is what should be my product family, the whole drill or its sub-assemblies, and should i do an integrated VSM to incorporate all the station or individual VSM station to station.

I would really be thankful if someone could help me in this. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Pritish,
I posted the process my team used to develop first VSM in a factory where we make products of different flavors. Check out the forum named "Value Stream Mapping - Can anyone help me in developing a VSM?". (http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=16266)
It might be helpful.

Thanks for ur help guys. i really appreciate the time and effort that u guys put to solve difficulties of people like me.

send you the sample of VSM in my company.

Pritish do a process Mapping of the products and start with time studies to find out cycle times of each product. It will help in preparing your VSM maps.

It is always difficult to value stream map in a environment with a large mix of product. One way I approach this is to think in terms of the a "Process Family" instead of a "Product Family". A process family is a series of operations that are common to many different products. Many times this type of thinking will expose other areas of opportunity on the shop floor. Once you know what you want to VSM, do as others have said in this post - know your improvement targets. These targets are what makes a really good future state VSM shine.

Roger

So my question is what should be my product family, the whole drill or its sub-assemblies, and should i do an integrated VSM to incorporate all the station or individual VSM station to station.
Lean can break down to marco lean and micro lean, you need to do both. SUggest first go for the whole station in general to reduce the bigger waste. After that, then only go into the individual section