Key Points

• Value Stream Mapping is a fantastic way for a business to see what’s wasteful in the organization.
• It’s easy for too much waste to build up in service operations, which is why Value Stream Mapping is so handy.
• Paired together, VSM can help streamline work, cut costs, and deliver better for the customer.

One of the most popular tools in corporate arsenals for looking at how everything is working is Value Stream Mapping. Basically, a way to diagram every step that is involved in bringing something to market, it has quickly become fundamental in helping organizations, large and small, identify and eliminate all kinds of waste.

Unsurprisingly, there are a few different types of value streams available, including development, operational, and support, with the middle being the most common. It’s here that you can also look at what steps of a process are going to directly affect the customer experience, which is critical to gaining customer loyalty.

What Is Value Stream Mapping?

Diving a little deeper into what Value Stream Mapping really is, think of it this way: have you felt like you worked somewhere that was a mess of emails, phone calls, and passing the baton between different departments?

If that’s you, and we only imagine there are many of you out there, there is a good chance that Value Stream Mapping is going to be your new best friend. In so many words, this is a tool that helps you and others inside an organization visualize the entire flow from the start of a customer’s request to delivery.

The goal with Value Stream Mapping, or VSM, is to identify and shine a big spotlight on any part of a process that is causing bottlenecks. This process originates from Toyota and its manufacturing process in the 1990s, and it has since become a staple for thousands of businesses around the world.

The goal is to try to see the big picture, on paper, in the form of a diagram. You could even think of Value Stream Mapping as something of a treasure map to efficiency, where every step of a value either adds value or gets kicked aside. At its core, VSM is going to break down entire processes by looking at different steps and how long it takes to complete them.

This chart might not be pretty, but it’s the beginning of a conversation between internal teams that can talk through what is working and what isn’t.

Value Stream Mapping and Service Operations

If you think about it, it’s easy to look and understand how Value Stream Mapping and service operations can easily become a perfect match. Visual Stream Mapping fits service operations almost like a glove, by being able to map out different flows, like customer inquiry to resolution, to help uncover any reasoning behind delays.

Thinking back to when Lean hit manufacturing, Visual Stream Mapping became the hero, and it still is, as it’s been able to revolutionize everything from how companies handle support tickets. Whether it’s in banking or healthcare, there is a definite way to see how VSM and service operations take full advantage of digital tools, which means that old-school diagrams are merging with software so you can make real-time tweaks.

Additionally, Value Stream Mapping focuses heavily on change, which makes it an ideal opportunity for quick and even personalized results. The hope is that VSM can build a culture that believes in and takes full advantage of the idea of continuous improvement, allowing the whole company, and not just independent departments, to take feedback and convert it into quick fixes.

What are the Challenges of Service Operations?

It should go without saying that for anyone who works in service operations, it can feel a lot like herding cats. You have to navigate what feels like an endless stream of handoffs, often vague timelines, and surprises that come out of left field from everyone, from your team to the customer themselves.

You shouldn’t be surprised to see headaches and or bottlenecks exist in areas like approval processes, and it’s even worse when great ideas get lost in the mix, don’t return to the surface.

The sad but true reality is that the challenges of service operations often stem from invisible processes, like email chains to manual data entry, the latter of which can lead to errors. If something is taking too long to happen, customers can bail and decide they won’t want something anymore, all while your team is focused on non-value tasks instead of what the customer asked for and wanted yesterday.

The good news is that Value Stream Mapping can shine the flashlight on what’s wrong. This is especially true if you can spot the waste early, as it allows you and your team to take back your own time and build trust between different teams internally.

How Value Stream Mapping Can Enhance Service Operations

Visualizing End-to-End Flows

When you think about Value Stream Mapping, it all starts when you look at drawing the service journey from request to resolution. You also have to map out different steps, like a “customer call” or “data review,” so you can see where all the time a team is spending is going. This speaks directly to the idea of trying to track total lead time as well, and you have to try and knock this down from maybe 10 days to three, to show how you can map out delay cuts.

Tracking lead time is a fantastic way to visualize where customer pain points exist, which directly ties into operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. There is a strong argument to be made that tracking shorter times can boost customer retention as much as 20%. This is especially true if you can cut the time it takes to deliver to a customer by as much as 50%, which shows Value Stream Mapping’s real value in dollars saved.

Identifying and Eliminating Waste

Value Stream Mapping is best known for identifying and eliminating waste, which is precisely why diagrams are used. This is also the best challenge of Value Stream Mapping, trying to identify what waste exists accurately. This process involves a detailed analysis of every step in the value stream, and there is no question that laying everything out can be daunting.

However, being able to measure the amount of waste that exists in order to quantify how successful your cleanup processes might be. It’s this step that is going to be the decision maker of whether or not service operations can help lead the rest of teh company to be a leaner, meaner operation.

Why do you want to measure waste? This is a good question and it’s one not enough people ask; however, the answer is important as it identifies where money is leaking out of the business, in methods from lost hours to busy work. The return is that you can look now to free up resources and better serve customers.

Optimizing Handoffs and Information Flow

Among the most important things to remember is that Value Stream Mapping isn’t a one-and-done process. The goal is to spark Kaizen events where teams are able to tweak the map based on fresh data, which speaks directly to the idea of continuous improvement. Everything from monitoring improvement cycles, of which teams should be doing at least four per quarter.

Driving Continuous Improvement

At the very top of the priority list for Value Stream Mapping is the idea of driving continuous improvement. Monitoring cycles, quarterly, is a great way to start building the right habits of finding and identifying excellence in the organization.

This is done to help prevent the company from slumping again and backsliding into previous areas of concern. Success in this area for service operations is highly dependent on ensuring that measuring cycles can help keep things fresh as new bottlenecks are spotted.

Getting Started with Value Stream Mapping and Service Operations

If you want to get started with Value Stream Mapping and service operations, don’t hesitate to jump right in. A good place to start is by looking at a high-pain process, like onboarding, and gathering a cross-team group to map it all out on a whiteboard. The goal is to make this collaborative and casual, with absolutely no finger-pointing.

Hopefully, you can set a goal based on what you find on this whiteboard, like halving wait times or celebrating the first insights the team sees as an area to fix right away. The next step is to analyze the map and find the way, then shift directions and brainstorm fixes in a quick Kaizen huddle, so owners and timelines can be established.

Tracking progress is key, and you won’t know if you are successful without doing so. However, even with progress tracking, the end goal is to roll Value Stream Mapping out to more teams by making it digital, so it’s something other teams can adapt for their own internal needs inside the service operations organization.

Benefits of Value Stream Mapping in Service Operations

If you’re wondering about the benefits, and you should, rest assured that VSM is going to supercharge service operations. This might be reflected in seeing lead times slashed by 20, 30, or even 50%, all while customer satisfaction is increasing.

In addition, you’ll hopefully start to see the financial benefits in a hurry as cost savings from less rework start to flow directly into other departments that need the money for other reasons.

Better yet, teams love the clarity that Value Stream Mapping brings to their group, and you just might find that they are more engaged with the day-to-day work if they know there is something being done to knock out the bottlenecks they face on a daily basis. Plus, better flows during the work day mean fewer errors, which means increased employee morale, which hopefully translates to happier customers.

Ultimately, Value Stream Mapping should help make an organization, no matter its size, more agile, so it can pivot to new services faster than the competition. It will also cement a reputation as being reliable and innovative, which earns repeat customer business.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Unsurprisingly, Value Stream Mapping is a popular tool in a variety of fields, including the assembly line, retail, and other organizational types. Of course, if you want to go back in time, you can take a read through our step-by-step guide on Value Stream Mapping for beginners.

Alternatively, you skip reading all about Value Stream Mapping and try something different, like learning how to cut the fat with Lean Six Sigma and security operations centers. Additionally, try another great read on how Kaizen enhances customer feedback systems, which ties together nicely with Value Stream Mapping.

Conclusion

All in, Value Stream Mapping is far more than just a tool, it’s an opportunity to create a blueprint to drive your service operations into the future. From visualizing flows to saying goodbye to waste, adding VSM to service operations can help deliver a new level of efficiency that sticks. With the right map, you have the way to chart the right path for the future.