Phase 3 – leveling
At this point, the VSM team has conducted a series of Gemba walks to collect information they used for their value stream mapping exercises. They have built a current state map and future state maps to guide improvements in meeting customer demand and implementing continuous flows. The last future state map they will construct helps guide improvements in production leveling.
Leveling is a strategy that's used to distribute the work required to support our customers' demands over time. Our goal is to continuously feed our value stream with new customer orders, at the rate of the Takt time, so that we don't lose production time while waiting for new orders to arrive and have other times where the value stream contains more work than it can take on.
In an ideal state, production leveling aims to produce the same number of items consistently and just at the rate of the Takt time. Unfortunately, customer orders don't often come in as...
