Value Stream Mapping: increasing the efficiency of the development process

You want to identify opportunities to speed up product development processes by making them more efficient. Value Stream Mapping, a tool traditionally used for material and product flows, can be adapted to analyze and improve product development processes. The aim is to map value flows in order to :

• understand a product development process and its interaction with the engineering value chain;

• study process efficiency on the basis of quantitative data;

• identify and eliminate waste to increase product development efficiency and reduce development time.