Accurately target your continuous improvement efforts to where they will have substantial and sustainable impact on quality, costs, time to market, and other performance factors that are critical to customers and your company’s success.
Learn how to use value-stream mapping, a fundamental lean management tool that creates “blueprints” for applying other techniques such as kaizen events most effectively.

A value-stream map is a drawing – using a computer or pencil and paper – of the operations, steps, inputs, and outputs that make up a process. Value-stream mapping is significantly more powerful than tools such as process mapping or layout diagrams because they capture information flow as well as material flow and other key data. A map pulls out processes from the background clutter of an organization, so you can build an entire value stream based on lean principles.
Benefits
- Establish a direction for the company’s improvement efforts, ensuring that improvement efforts eliminate problems customers deeply care about
- Gain a better understanding of the linkages between material and information flow
- Create the basis for an effective lean implementation plan by designing how your factory’s door-to-door material and information flow could ideally operate
- Give operators, engineers, and managers a common language and process for continuous improvement]
- Avoid the common mistake of cherry-picking individual lean tools, which creates isolated islands of improvement and limited benefits
- Learn at your own pace, on your own schedule, alone or with your team
- Plus, the workshop is based on the tested and proven methodology created for LEI’s popular Learning to See workbook , translated into 16 languages, and recipient of a Research Award from the Shingo Institute at the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, Utah State University
Workshop Outline
Through video instruction, hands-on exercises, readings by lean experts, successful lean case studies, and three 1 hour sessions with a live coach to answer questions and give feedback on your own value stream map, you will cover:
- Welcome to Online VSM! (~7 minutes)]
- Introduction (~15 minutes)
- Current State Map (~40 minutes plus hands-on time)
- Your Own Current State Map (10 minutes plus hands-on time)
- Assess Current State (30 minutes plus hands-on time)
- Future State Map (45 minutes plus hands-on time)
- Implementation Plan (20 minutes plus hands-on time)
- Resources & Feedback (5 minutes)
Who Should Attend
- Continuous improvement professionals, operators, engineers, managers, supervisors, technical support personnel, and change agents
- Organizations at any level of a lean journey, particularly (though not exclusively) those just beginning
- Any industry with multi-step processes
Learning to See, however, no prerequisite training or reading is required for this workshop. Familiarity with lean management basics is helpful.
Eric Ethington
Senior Coach and Chief Engineer
Lean Enterprise Institute
Coauthor, The Power of Process
President, Lean Shift Consulting
Eric has distilled his passion for and knowledge of lean thinking and practice in product and process development, nurtured over 30 years of work experience, into The Power of Process: A Story of Innovative Lean Process Development (2022). Before founding Lean Shift Consulting and becoming a coach and program manager at LEI in 2016, he […]
Read more about Eric Ethington