An ex-Toyota internal consultant has expressed an opinion that companies are achieving only 10% of their potential for process improvement. In the consultant's words, "most manufacturing seems to be focused on achieving a 35–40 percent productivity gain over three to five years, when they should actually be focusing on a 400 percent improvement." Many manufacturing companies have exhausted gains
... [Show full abstract] that can be derived from the shop floor, and further productivity gain can only be captured by shifting attention to non-production business processes in administration and information flow. Lean practitioners have used value stream mapping (VSM) as a tool to analyze the entire value stream of a product moving through a manufacturing facility from raw material to the finished state for a long time now with considerable success. VSM allows the entire product flow to be captured in a graphical form to facilitate the application of lean manufacturing principles in a systematic manner. Although VSM aims to analyze and optimize both material and information flow for the product, improving information flow is left out in most VSM analysis as the percentage value-added time is calculated based solely on the material flow in the process. As most business processes are nothing more than information flow or a combination of information and material flow, VSM is therefore not best suited to optimize them.
