Read a value stream map - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

- [Instructor] In this movie, I'd like to take a look at a value stream map that documents a process for assembling robots for sale by a consumer electronics company. I'll point out information flows, describe how the data relating to workstations and other resources fit into the overall process, and also identify the beginning and end of the elements we're concerned with. There's a lot to take in. You ready? Okay, here it is, in all of its glory. It seems like there's a lot, and, well, frankly, there is, but we can break it down fairly straightforwardly. If you look at the top right corner, you will see three pieces of information. That is our weekly demand for total robots, then the production time available in seconds. So that would be five days, times eight hours, times 60 minutes per hour, times 60 seconds, and that adds up to 144,000 seconds available. The takt time is the heartbeat of the process. And that is how often, on average, we need to have a cat robot come off of this assembly line. So to meet our weekly demand of 600 cat robots, we need to turn one out every 240 seconds, or every four minutes on average. We feed that information to customer service and order intake. And that information, in turn, is sent to the supplier and also production scheduling, which sends its information to the three different stations, limbs, head, and back, to indicate how hard they're going to be expected to work for the next week. Over on the left, we have our supplier that sends us our components, and we're marking the components that we get as our raw materials. And you can see from the flag on the left that this indicates the start of the process that we are analyzing. Underneath each of our inventory triangles, we have the number of units available, and those flow to the right as you're looking at the screen. We start with station number one, which has three full-time employees available, but six people are trained to perform that task. And then you can see the processing time, cycle time, which is the processing time divided by the number of people allocated to the task. So we have a cycle time of 110 seconds. And utilization is the amount of the takt time by percentage that the cycle time takes up. So we are attaching limbs to our cat robot about every 110 seconds, and that's 45.8% of our takt time of 240. And as we float to the right, you can see similar characteristics for the two other stations. One thing to note, and you'll see this toward the end of each chapter, is the amount of inventory that you have in terms of days. If you work five days a week and you have a weekly demand of 600 units, then your daily demand is 120. You can divide the units available in inventory on average by your daily demand to find the number of days in inventory that you typically have. And at the right end of the value stream map, we have a flag indicating the end of the process we're analyzing. But we also have our finished goods that are going off to shipping. That information is included for completeness. And that's a look at a value stream map. We will build this up ourselves in the next chapter.