Part 2: Measuring "Flow"
Welcome to Part 2 of a 5-part series on Lean Design. In Part 1 I made the case that the achievement of “flow” is a major goal in the design of a Perfect Value Stream. In this lesson I’ll cover how flow can be measured, and be used for Kaizen, benchmarking, and product costing. We will then review how a company grew by 500% in a few years, by applying flow methods.
Measuring “Flow”
What gets measured gets done, so it makes good sense to have a repeatable and consistent way of measuring the time between the receipt of a customer order and the completion of the order. In the world of manufacturing this is called Manufacturing Cycle Time (MCT) or Manufacturing Critical-Path Time (MCPT). The term Critical Path is important to acknowledge, since what we are measuring is not the total work content time of a product, but rather the elapsed time it takes to get through the system. The more work that can be done at the same time, in feeder lines for example, the shorter MCT will be.