This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Get Your Map Started with a SIPOC
One of the fastest ways to get started in mapping a process is with a SIPOC. This kind of map gives us a very simple, high level view to help us begin. If you want a more detailed view, you can use a Value Stream Map (2.4).
SIPOC stands for Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customer. It allows us to see the basic process flow, the suppliers and customers, and the inputs and outputs for each step. This information can be extremely useful, for example:
- We can quickly see the connections between our process steps
- We can see what is needed to perform our steps correctly
- We can also manage risk efficiently, as we are seeing interacting points that might be affected by any changes we make.
In other words, when our SIPOC is filled out, we can see a large amount of information about our process at a glance.
The first thing we do in our SIPOC is a high level process flow – the main steps we perform to create our product or service. For the sake of continuity, let’s use the process flow from the Shoe Emporium in our story:
Figure 3: The basic process flow outlined in our SIPOC, based on the Shoe Emporium sales process.
In a SIPOC we are describing only the main steps – as you would if you were telling someone you just met at a barbeque, about your job. Once we have a high level process flow, we can add the Supplier, Input, Output and Customer for each step as well. Remember – our Supplier can be any step before the current one, and our Customer can be any step after our current one.
Figure 4: Our SIPOC with the additional information included so we can see our inputs and outputs at a glance.
We can also add “Customer Requirements” (which are the required outputs of the process), and “Measures”, or how the process is measured so we know when it is successful or completed. This additional information is also very useful, and would make our diagram a SIPOCr+M.
Now that we have a high level view of our process, we discover problems in our work with a Value Stream Map.
This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.
Selected chapters from the story within Five minute Lean:
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Makes a Change
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Discovers a New Way
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Performs a Balancing Act
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Pulls the Trigger
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Sets a New Standard
- Lean Parable – Where Lisa Becomes a Leader
Check out these selected chapters from the teachings within Five Minute Lean:
- Five Minute Lean – Create a New Standard Procedure and Checklist for Quality Control
- Five Minute Lean – Work Towards One-Piece-Flow (and Reducing Silos or Batching)
- Five Minute Lean – Use Feedback to Fix and Guarantee
- Five Minute Lean – Use Pareto to Find Where to Start
- Five Minute Lean – The Power of Incentives – What is Measured and Rewarded Improves
- Five Minute Lean – Value is Determined by the Customer
- Five Minute Lean – Create a Pull System with FIFO, Kanban Triggers and Visual Management
- Five Minute Lean – Introduction
- Five Minute Lean – Help Your Process Flow with Line Balancing
- Five Minute Lean – Add Important Data to Your Map
- Five Minute Lean – Use Kaizen and Kaizen Events to Help Stakeholder Buy-In
- Five Minute Lean – Organise Your Process with Five S
- Five Minute Lean – Heijunka: Level the Workload when Demand Fluctuates
- The Five Minute Catch-up
- Five Minute Lean – Gather Direct Feedback and Indirect Feedback
- Five Minute Lean – Put it Together With Design for Ease of Use
- Five Minute Lean – Solve the Real Cause of the Problem
- Five Minute Lean – Make Feedback Meaningful with Kano Analysis
- Five Minute Lean – Implement With Agile for Fast Iterations and Feedback
- Five Minute Lean – Eliminate the Eight Wastes to Improve Flow