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Why Value Stream Management Foundation Certification?

Value stream management (VSM) is an essential part of lean manufacturing. This article explains what value stream management is and why it is important for your company.

Value stream management is an essential part of lean manufacturing. The process helps companies improve their efficiency by identifying bottlenecks within the production line and eliminating wasteful steps. It also helps companies identify opportunities to reduce costs and increase profits.

But value stream mapping isn’t always straightforward. In fact, it can be quite complex. So, if you want to get started with VSM, then you should consider taking the VSM Foundation certification.

What is VSM and why is it gaining importance?

Value stream management is a lean production technique that helps identify areas in which waste occurs. By examining the entire value chain, it aims to eliminate unnecessary steps and find opportunities for cost savings at each level of its operation. So let’s explore this process briefly below.

The most basic form of VSM involves identifying all product-specific activities within an organization(process map). Together with these maps, comes a new kind of business data that can be used to evaluate process efficiency on a local, company-wide or broader global level.

  1. Identify the steps in which waste occurs at each production stage and develop metrics for these wastes
  2. Create flow diagrams with costs along the value chain to identify opportunities for improvement within individual areas
  3. Evaluate goals against relevant measures developed during this phase by calculating weighted scores called KPIs (KISS – known as key performance indicators)
  4. Identify and resolve process bottlenecks towards the goal at hand

Value stream mapping or VSM is a method of identifying potential bottlenecks and eliminating steps in your process.

A value stream map can help you:

  • 1. Eliminate wasteful work
  • 2. Getting rid of unnecessary steps provides room to increase revenue
  • 3. By lowering costs and increasing production speed through more efficient operations
  • 4. Precisely define real needs for product development
  • 5. To start analyzing the business processes
Benefits of applying VSM in the real world

Proper VSM methods Increases information flow and improves effectiveness of the processes in your organization. Through various projects, Cisco has explored areas where processes can be simplified. In its value stream analysis project, it showed how eliminating unnecessary steps positively affects an operation’s revenue and inventory-to-sales ratio by 0%, 1% to 5%. This approach also enables companies to reduce costs and improve quality simultaneously. This results in a well functioning company with increased quality and speed.

How does VSM Complement DevOps?

When DevOps took off, processes slowing down was a common complaint. Logging all the information needed to make improvements is hard if you are not familiar with how things work in your business. The VSM is a way of assessing projects quickly and accurately using data from another group or department within your own company, so it saves valuable resources for more critical projects.

VSM Foundation Certification from DevOps Institute

The VSM Foundation certification is obtained from the DevOps Institute. It is based on mastery of understanding and using the concepts involved with traditional 3S (shipping, safety, scheduling) value stream mapping strategies combined with many new approaches. This helps to improve product development cycles and operational efficiency across an organization.

Why is VSMF Certification important?

There are many reasons why people should take time to become Value Stream Management Foundation Certified.

The first reason is that it is an opportunity to learn. They will learn about all of the different aspects of VSM including Lean Manufacturing, Quality, Continuous Improvement, etc. Knowledge of these different aspects of Value Stream Management is essential to being able to continuously improve the productivity of an organization. Knowledge is power.

The second reason why people should take time to become VSM Certified is to improve their resume and set themselves apart from the competition. It is important for an organization to have a qualified and certified employee. By investing in certification, you will be able to prove that you are qualified and certified.

The third and final reason is that it will allow them to develop the skills and competencies that they need for their future job. Knowledge of value stream management can be seen as a baseline skill set. But if you want to move up in an organization and advance faster than others, then by investing in knowledge on different aspects of VSM (e.g., Lean Manufacturing methods) certification could help you stand out from the crowd and get you the job of your choice.

How can you get Value Stream Management Foundation Certification?

In order to qualify for this certification, you must have a basic understanding of lean management.

Process to apply for the VSM Certification:

Step 1: Click here to register for the VSM Training.

Step 2: After you have finished the training successfully, you can register for the exam

Step 3: Take the exam

Step 4: Obtain your certification from DevOps Institute

Join us on Facebook and LinkedIn for a live conversation with Helen Beal, Chief Ambassador for DevOps Institute and Chair of Value Stream Management Consortium, along with Suresh GP, MD and Mentor, TaUB Solutions.  Let’s address everything you have ever wondered about Value Stream Management (VSM)