Too many organizations today suffer from silo-centric behavior and intra-organizational conflict. Yet most don't understand what's holding them back from achieving outstanding performance.

Value stream mapping--an essential but underusedmethodology--is a proven approach to help you visualize and resolve disconnects, redundancies, and gaps in your value delivery system. More than merely a tool to eliminateoperational waste, value stream mapping is a highly effective means to transform leadership thinking, define strategy and priorities, and create customer-centric work flow.

In this detailed guide, business performance improvement experts Karen Martin and Mike Osterling present a practical way to deeply understand how work gets done--in any environment--and how to design improvedwork systems.

You'll learn how to:

• Prepare and engage your leadership team in the transformation process
• Gain a deep understanding about your current work systems and the related barriers to delivering value
• Design a future state that enables outstanding performance on all fronts
• Adopt the new design and lay the foundation for continued improvement

Whether you are a novice, an experienced improvement practitioner, or a leader, Value Stream Mapping will help you design and operate your business more effectively. And if your organization already uses value stream mapping, this book will help you improve yourtransformation efforts.

In today's rapid-fire business environment, there are too many problems to be solved and too many opportunities to be leveraged to operate without a highly effective means for accomplishing the important work to be done.Value stream mapping is the missing link in business management and, properly executed, has the power to address many business woes.

PRAISE FOR VALUE STREAM MAPPING

"Value stream mapping has evolved from its roots as a tool used by geeks to reimagine and reconfigure manufacturing operations to a process to enable deep organizational intervention and transformation. With Value Stream Mapping, Karen Martin and Mike Osterling provide an outstanding guide for practitioners engaged in the challenging work of improving the horizontal flow of value across organizations."
-- John Shook, Chairman and CEO, Lean Enterprise Institute, and author, Learning to See

"Despite decades of viewing value stream mapping as the core tool of Lean transformations, there is still confusion. Karen and Mike put mapping in its proper perspective as a methodology for getting high-performing teams to see waste, share a future state vision, and build meaningful actions that are carried out with passion and purpose."
-- Jeffrey Liker, author, The Toyota Way

"In Value Stream Mapping, Karen and Mike not only provide a great how-to book for transforming value streams, they also demonstrate the benefits that taking a holistic view can have on an organization's culture and commitment to customer value. There is something to learn for the novice and expert on every page."
-- Jeff Chester, Chief Revenue Officer & Senior Vice President, Availity

"Martin and Osterling have written an excellent book that shows you how to do value stream mapping and do it right. Follow their advice and your organization will get the profoundly radical change required to better serve your customers and create unprecedented profits and agility."
-- Brian Maskell, author, Practical Lean Accounting

Martin, Karen

Karen Martin is president of The Karen Martin Group, Inc., a firm that specializes in business performance improvement and Lean management practices. She's also the author of the Shingo Research Award-winning The Outstanding Organization, an instructor in the University of California, San Diego's Lean Enterprise program, and an industry advisor to the University of San Diego's Industrial and Systems Engineering program.

Mike Osterling provides support and leadership to organizations on their Lean transformation journey. Prior to consulting, Mike played a key internal role in Schneider Electric's Lean transformation during the 1990s. He is the cofounder of San Diego State University's Lean Enterprise program and continues to teach at SDSU and other universities.