Automation of VSM with a focus on customers and suppliers

Abstract

Value Stream Management is a methodology for mapping and analyzing actual value streams as well as designing target ones. The end-to-end (E2E) consideration of a value stream from a company’s perspective including the manufacturing process as value-adding transformation, the supplier as supply or source and the customer as demand or sink of the value stream reveals a holistic overview of the entire supply chain. This overview facilitates a structured elimination of wastes according to the principles of lean management. Value Stream Management is a widely applied and field-tested approach, whose fundamental principles are still valid, but facing challenges in the context of an increasing digitalized and volatile environment. Several recent publications refer to this disadvantage and provide approaches, to enhance or improve the methodology by the integration of data. Though, all of these reviewed studies are limited to investigation of the manufacturing process, whereby the customer and supplier perspectives are largely not considered in detail. Target of the paper at hand is the review of the key performance indicator (KPI) in terms of the domains of customer and supplier within the Value Stream Management framework, the identification of potential data sources in regard to business application systems and the design of a modular framework, enabling the automation of the Value Stream Mapping (VSM) in various process and system landscapes with special emphasis on the value stream’s source and sink.