The Application of Value Stream Mapping to Lean Engineering

For the past few years, almost every manufacturing or service industry has been trying to get “lean.” The tools that enable waste elimination in engineering processes are equally important and little has been done to map the application of lean tools from manufacturing to the engineering process. Value stream mapping for manufacturing is a basic, graphical tool used to describe production processes and highlight sources of waste. In its current form, value stream mapping cannot be implemented in engineering processes due to fundamental differences between manufacturing and engineering processes. This paper identifies these differences as well as similarities between the manufacturing and engineering. We then use them to create analogies that enable the adaptation of value stream mapping for use in engineering. The application of this tool to engineering processes is validated by an industry application to manufacturing engineering processes, specifically the equipment installation process. With this map of the equipment installation process, our industrial team was able to identify wastes and sources of wastes, and design a future state where the lead-time of the installation process was reduced by over 90% with a much better first time quality.