00:00Often asked whether you should use VSM's to find bottlenecks or capacity constraints in production
00:04and my answer is no, I'd like to explain myself.
00:07The best way to understand this is to use the analogy of the world of project portfolios.
00:12Let's take the example of new product development.
00:15We have a portfolio of new products being developed and they're all going through the organisation
00:19and somewhere in that organisation there's a capacity constraint, for instance in the prototyping department.
00:24And that is the capacity constraint, or the control point at least, of the portfolio.
00:30But there is a second dimension of constraints in this project environment,
00:34which are the constraints of each individual project.
00:38If you take a project, its constraint, what will determine its performance,
00:42is its critical chain, if you're using the theory of constraints,
00:45or simply the critical path if you're not.
00:47It's a sequence of tasks which, when put end-to-end, give the duration of the entire project.
00:52And if you want to improve the performance of that one project,
00:54you will analyse that work breakdown structure, that critical chain or critical path,
00:58and try and optimise it to increase the performance of that project.
01:02If we take this analogy back into the world of production, what does it mean?
01:06Well, the capacity constraint and the product constraint can be analysed in this way.
01:12If you want to improve the performance of one particular product in your factory,
01:16then you will use a VSM.
01:17That's what it's designed for.
01:18You choose your product, and you do a VSM, and then you can improve it by getting rid of waste,
01:23getting rid of wasted time, and use the VSM methodology to improve the forms of that product.
01:29But it is not that way that you should identify the capacity constraints on the bottlenecks.
01:34To do that, you should look for the cues in your factory.
01:36And there are dozens of videos on the YouTube channel of Marathon Consulting that explain how you do that.
01:42You will find where all those products going through the system tend to pile up,
01:45and they pile up in front of the capacity constraint.
01:48So that's why we say we use VSM a lot.
01:50They're a very powerful tool, but they're not the best way of identifying where a capacity constraint or a bottleneck
01:55is.
01:56I hope that's made that very clear.
