“Fish Your Value Stream For The Biggest Catch!”

“Where Should I Fish?”

One of the biggest challenges that fisherman have always faced is determining where to fish for the biggest catch. Many organizations today face the same problem when it comes to where to fish for the biggest improvement opportunities. For most all organizations with a process, system, or procedure that involves serving a customer or client, the value stream is the best place to fish for the biggest catch “a.k.a. bottom line results.” Whether you’re a service company, a manufacturer, a financial institution, a restaurant, a government entity, or a health care facility, you have processes and steps involved with getting your product or services developed, processed, and delivered to your customer or client. These critical processes and steps are your value stream. Every company, whether for-profit or non-profit, that provides a product or service typically has one or more value streams.

“You’ve Told Me Where To Fish…Now What?”

Knowing where to fish is only part of the equation. You must also know where to cast your hook and bait for the big catch. Cast into an area of the stream with no fish and guess what you’ll catch. Nothing!

In many organizations, leadership too often focuses its efforts on fishing for results within the wrong processes and then they can’t understand why their efforts didn’t result in a “big catch.” When fishing the value stream for results you’ll always find opportunities for improving the bottom line. Why? Because steps within the value stream all lead directly to your customers and clients. Improving a process and/or lowering costs associated with your customers will lead you toward a positive result. If efforts are focused only on internal processes and systems you’ll likely end the day frustrated and have difficulty in understanding where the true bottom line results are at the end of a project. Granted, operations may temporarily improve as a result of such efforts, but the bottom line improvement is difficult to measure and the probability of realizing sustained results is very low. In some cases, these bottom line results are non-existent because the process improved involved only the internal rather than the external (customer).

“It’s Only A Catch When They’re In The Boat”

It’s great to know where you should fish and cast for the biggest catch, but if you don’t land‘em you’ve failed to produce a result. Granted, it is sometimes fun to just go through the motions, but it doesn’t put dinner on the table.

Once the true value stream of an operation has been identified and developed, it’s time to set the hook and reel in the results. This is accomplished by developing a “future state” value stream that puts into place the new and improved steps and processes that lead to lower costs, improved throughput, additional capacity, and improved customer satisfaction. It also highlights the steps that must be taken to get those “big catch” results.

“Enjoy the Taste Of Your Efforts”

Ummm…doesn’t it taste good? Nothing tastes better than reaping the rewards of your hard work. We all realize that we must continue fishing for the next big catch in order to survive, but it’s great to taste success. The key element of continual positive results is for companies is to keep fishing the right stream…to keep casting… and to keep reeling them in. If you do, you’ll continue to taste success.