Creating a future state design is essential for the long-term success of your organization. However, you must first be fluent in how to develop a value stream map and how to identify wastes within it. This is because they pave the path for you to start thinking about the future state of the process.
Pointers to help you begin a conversation on your future state design:
- What is the takt time?
- Will we ship directly to the customer or to a finished goods warehouse?
- Where can we use continuous flow?
- What increment of work will you consistently release and take away at the pacemaker?
- Where will our pacemaker be?
- How will the level of production mix at the pacemaker?
- Where will we need supermarket pull systems?
- What process improvements will we need to achieve our future state design?
4 things to avoid while creating your future state design:
To help you out with your future state design, here are 4 things you should avoid doing:
- Don’t identify improvement opportunities by themselves. Rather, identify them towards the goal you wish to achieve for the value stream map.
- Don’t rank improvement opportunities by just effort and impact. Instead, weigh them in the order of their importance to achieving the defined goal.
- Don’t seek perfect solutions. Rather, see what can be worked out quickly enough as an interim arrangement to reach the future state in time.
- Don’t just use ‘band-aid’ solutions for the problems. You may think of imperfect solutions, but eventually, you should devise a long-term solution to the problem. Identify and park them if they call for execution in future. Involve the team and come up with innovative ways to fix a problem that obstructs the path of achieving the future state.
Keep in mind that you cannot design a future state with little or no knowledge of Lean tools. Therefore, make sure to check out the various Lean tools you can use to help facilitate your future state design.