Phase 2 – continuous flow

Now that the VSM team has addressed issues of customer demand, they can start figuring out how to improve production flows to meet our customers' demands. In this section, we will continue our future state mapping activities and address issues related to establishing and maintaining Lean continuous flows.

Continuous flow is a Lean strategy that's used to achieve the ideal goal of moving a single work item through every step of your value stream activities instead of grouping and moving lots of work items collectively as batches (also known as Make One, Move One; One-Piece Flows; Single-Piece Flows). The objective is to produce and move one work item at a time, or at least the smallest practical number of items, through a series of value stream activities as continuously as possible. As part of a pull-based production control strategy, each activity produces only what is necessary to fulfill the next activity's request.

What establishes...