All about flow

We have identified that value must be viewed from the customer point of view. We have briefly looked at the concept of the Value Stream, the steps that add value in your business. Once we have removed the obvious waste from the value stream we want to look at flow.

Flow happens when work moves, non-stop from one value step to the next. The work does not wait between steps in queues, it does not get bundled up into batches to be processed and there are no rework steps arising from errors or incomplete information.

Flow is a fairly obvious thing to do. Everyone would agree that work should keep moving. But some of the ways of achieving flow are quite counter intuitive. One-piece flow, for example, goes against the batch and queue ethos of mass production. Batching work to all be done at once seems to be more efficient. And it is, but only at that point. So if you wait until you have 20 first-time buyer mortgage forms to process because then you can do them all quickly at once, you may very well be quicker per form to do that processing. But to get that batch together means delaying forms until you have 20. This is detrimental to the end-to-end time for processing the form. The end-to-end time is the measurement that the customer cares about.

So to achieve flow managers and staff may have to let go of some "tried and trusted" ways of being more efficient. The pay off is that work will move faster and the end-to-end time for completing work will be lower, the customer will be happier and the efficiency of the system as a whole will be higher.

Best,

Rob