288 Int. J. Productivity and Quality Management, Vol. 10, No.

3, 2012

Productivity and quality improvement through value

stream mapping: a case study of Indian automotive
industry

Jaiprakash Bhamu, J.V. Shailendra Kumar

and Kuldip Singh Sangwan*
Department of Mechanical Engineering,
Birla Institute of Technology and Science,
Pilani (Rajasthan) – 333031, India
E-mail: [email protected]
E-mail: [email protected]
E-mail: [email protected]
E-mail: [email protected]
*Corresponding author
Abstract: Value stream mapping (VSM) is one of the most important lean
manufacturing tools to identify and reduce all type of wastes in a systematic
way. This paper demonstrates the effect of VSM implementation on cost of
poor quality, in-process rejections, percentage value addition, lead time, work
in process inventory, distance travelled by components and percentage scrap
through a case study of VSM implementation in an Indian automotive industry.
The results of the study show that the productivity and quality of a company
can be improved by implementation of VSM.
Keywords: value stream mapping; VSM; lean manufacturing; empirical
studies; productivity improvement; India.
Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Bhamu, J.,
Shailendra Kumar, J.V. and Sangwan, K.S (2012) ‘Productivity and quality
improvement through value stream mapping: a case study of Indian automotive
industry’, Int. J. Productivity and Quality Management, Vol. 10, No. 3,
pp.288–306.
Biographical notes: Jaiprakash Bhamu is a research scholar with Mechanical
Engineering Department of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani,
Rajasthan, India. His area of research is lean manufacturing.
J.V. Shailendra Kumar is an undergraduate student with Mechanical
Engineering Department of Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani,
Rajasthan.
Kuldip Singh Sangwan is a Senior Faculty of Mechanical and Manufacturing
Engineering at BITS, Pilani. He has over 19 years teaching experience at
graduate and post graduate levels. He has supervised many doctoral
theses in the area of world class manufacturing, environmentally conscious
manufacturing, reverse logistics, cellular manufacturing and lean
manufacturing. He is a reviewer of many prestigious international journals in
operations management. His areas of research interest are CMS, green
manufacturing, lean management, world-class manufacturing, concurrent
engineering, operations management, and application of fuzzy mathematics,
genetic algorithms, simulated annealing, and neural networks in design of
manufacturing system.

Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 Productivity and quality improvement through value stream mapping 289

1 Introduction

The lean concept originated in Japan after the second world war when the Japanese
manufacturers realised that they could not afford the massive investment required to build
devastated facilities. Toyota began the process of developing manufacturing processes to
minimise waste in all aspects of operations. They produced autos with less of
everything – half the human effort, half the manufacturing space, half the investment,
half the engineering hours – compared with mass production; the prevalent
manufacturing process at that time. Also, it required lesser inventory, resulted in fewer
defects, and produced greater and ever growing variety of products. This was possible
primarily through the Japanese effective management of production and human resources
(Womack et al., 1990).
The goal of lean manufacturing is to become highly responsive to customer demand
by reducing the waste in human effort, inventory, time to market and manufacturing
space while producing quality products efficiently and economically. Lean manufacturing
provides competitive edge to the manufacturers due to reduced cost, and improved
productivity and quality. Several authors have posited lean production as the best
possible production system that can be implemented in any company (Womack et al.,
1990). Lean manufacturing has been implemented in conjunction with Six Sigma
(Lee and Chang, 2010, Vinodh et al., 2011) and quality management systems (Karthi
et al., 2011; Salah et al., 2010). A major activity in the journey towards lean is the
effective management of the flow of products and services through series of activities
involved in providing value to the customer, known as the value stream. Value stream
mapping (VSM) is one of the most widely used lean manufacturing tools used to
transform an organisation into a lean one.
In recent years, VSM has emerged as the preferred tool to implement lean
manufacturing. Hodge et al. (2011) developed an hierarchical lean implementation model
and concluded that VSM is, generally, the first tool used for lean implementation and also
used at all levels of hierarchy. Jones and Womack (2000) view VSM as the process of
visually mapping the existing flow of information and material, and preparing a future
state map for better performance. They define VSM as the simple process of directly
observing the flow of information and material as they occur; summarising them visually;
and then envisioning a future state with better performance. This visual representation
facilitates the process of lean implementation through the identification of the
value-added activities and elimination of the non-value added activities (Rother and
Shook, 1999). A value stream consists of everything including the non-value added
activities and provides a pictorial view of elements of the process for which the customer
is willing to pay (Tapping and Shuker, 2003). Thus, VSM provides a mean to visualise
process sequence, material flow and information flow for the entire value stream;
facilitates the identification of waste and the sources of waste; supports the prioritisation
of continuous improvement activities; and provides the basis for the development of an
overall improvement plan. Seth et al. (2008) used VSM to improve productivity and
capacity utilisation in an Indian edible cottonseed oil industry. Lasa et al. (2008) have
proved, based on the case study of an organisation manufacturing plastic casing
of mobile phones, that VSM is a suitable tool for redesigning the production systems.
Anand and Kodali (2009a) used QUEST simulation software for developing current
and future value stream maps to study the impact of various lean manufacturing elements
on the performance measures of an Indian automotive organisation. VSM has been
290 J. Bhamu et al.

applied on a large spectrum of industry including, automotive, textile, construction,

service, food, medical, electrical and electronics, and ceramic. This paper provides an
application of VSM in an Indian automotive industry to improve productivity and
quality. Next section provides a brief review of literature on VSM application in
production industries. Research motivation and methodology is presented in Section 3
followed by a case study of VSM implementation in an Indian automotive industry in
Section 4. Results have been discussed in Section 5 and Section 6 provides conclusions
of the paper.

2 Literature review on VSM

VSM was initially developed in mid 1990s and published in 1997 by Hines and Rich
(1997) with an objective to identify waste in individual value streams and to find an
appropriate tool for its removal. The seven initial tools were drawn by the authors from a
variety of academic and functional background such as industrial engineering, operations
management, systems dynamics, efficient consumer response, etc. Since then, VSM has
been a preferred tool in industry to improve productivity and quality by identifying and
reducing non-value added activities. Recently, Singh et al. (2011) presented a literature
review paper on value stream mapping in which they classified the literature into four
categories – conceptual work, empirical/modelling work, case studies and survey articles.
However, most of the literature available on VSM is on its implementation in different
industry sectors. Automotive industry has widely used it for productivity and quality
improvement (Bhamu and Sangwan, 2011).
Hines et al. (1998) developed value stream management system as a strategic and
operational approach to capture data, analysis, planning and implementation of effective
changes within the core cross-functional or cross-company processes required to achieve
a truly lean enterprise. VSM has been used to reduce the inventory and throughput time
by systematically reducing the non-value added time in a Norway based automotive
industry (Kalsaas, 2002). Huang and Liu (2005) used rough set theory in conjunction
with VSM to decrease work in process (WIP) inventory and logistics cost. The rough set
theory has been adopted and used to identify types of focused stages where lean controls
are required. Seth and Gupta (2005) used VSM, kanban, proper layout and visual control
to achieve productivity improvement at supplier end for an Indian auto industry by
identifying and eliminating wastes in different lines. Kumar et al. (2006) integrated lean
tools within Six Sigma methodology to achieve dramatic improvements in defect rate,
process standard deviation, first throughput yield, process capability, process mean and
overall equipment effectiveness. Wee and Wu (2009) used VSM and other lean tools in
conjunction with PDCA cycle and demonstrated productivity improvement, quality
enhancement, cost reduction and lead time reduction in Taiwan automotive industry. The
waste reduction in terms of unnecessary inventories, excessive transportation and idle
times has been achieved in an assembly line of a German auto organisation
manufacturing combustible injection valve by the application of VSM along with kanban,
supermarkets and internal transportation (milkrun) techniques (Alvarez et al., 2009).
 Productivity and quality improvement through value stream mapping 291

Anand and Kodali (2009b) used a simulation model in combination with VSM for an
Indian automotive industry to show the reduction in inventory, cycle time, floor space,
etc. by reducing the non-value added activities. Singh and Sharma (2009) applied VSM
in an Indian manufacturing firm to reduce the lead time, processing time, WIP inventory
and manpower requirement. Chen and Meng (2010) proposed a VSM based production
system for Chinese enterprises to help them deploy lean production systematically for
better productivity by eliminating roots of wastes. Sawhney et al. (2009) used VSM to
evaluate breakdown maintenance operations for enhancing the performance of
equipments.
Vinodh et al. (2010) applied VSM for enabling lean manufacturing implementation in
an Indian camshaft manufacturing industry to reduce the lead time and total cycle time
and to improve the delivery time. The application of VSM with 5S, stage inspection,
automatic storage and retrieval system and IT enabled logistics system has provided
sufficient reduction of idle time, cycle time and defects. VSM has been used in a small
cycle manufacturing company to identify the wastes and ways to eliminate it (Grewal,
2008). This resulted in 33.18% reduction in cycle time, 81.5% reduction in changeover
time and 81.4% reduction in lead time. Lasa et al. (2009) implemented VSM in six
organisations with different objectives, i.e., lead time variability reduction, area
reduction, workforce reduction, lead time reduction and response time variability
reduction; and found that VSM process has met the established objectives quite
satisfactorily. Dentz et al. (2009) showed that the use of VSM leads to improvements in
labour efficiency, quality, worker morale, and communication between management and
workers. Singh et al. (2010) used VSM to implement lean manufacturing in a production
industry which resulted in reduction of lead time (83.14%), processing time (12.62%),
WIP inventory (89.47%) and manpower requirement (30%). It also resulted in rise in
operator productivity by 42.86%. Yang and Lu (2011) used VSM in a liquid crystal
display manufacturing organisation to improve inventory cost by 57.2% and cycle time
by 49.7%. Singh et al. (2011) implemented VSM to show that it is an effective technique
for identification and reduction of waste in an industry. They achieved a reduction in
WIP by 80.09%, finished goods inventory by 50%, product lead time by 82.12%, station
cycle time by 3.75%, change over time by 6.75% and manpower required by 16.66%.
Vinodh et al. (2011) illustrated the benefits of VSM implementation in an Indian
automotive industry in term of reduction in machine downtime, increase in overall
equipment effectiveness, reduction in reject rate, reduction in inventory, reduction in
changeover time, increase in throughput and establishment of standard housekeeping
procedures. Mohanraj et al. (2011) showed that VSM is capable of tracking waste,
thereby streamlining the processes, but the framework of VSM does not enable the
systematic identification of waste and the techniques to eliminate them. A quality
function deployment (QFD) technique has been used by the authors for the scientific
prioritisation of wastes. Table 1 provides meaning of some common key matrices,
identified from the literature, which have been used in VSM.
This brief review of VSM literature shows that it is an effective tool to identify the
non-value added activities in a process for improvement in productivity and quality by
reducing lead time, WIP, scrap, change over time, cycle time, idle time, etc.
292 J. Bhamu et al.

Table 1 Standard VSM key matrices and their explanation

Key matrices Meaning

Available time (A/T) Total production time - planned down time (Excludes meal time)
Takt time (T/T) The rate at which a company must produce a product to satisfy its
customer demand. It is calculated by dividing working time per day (in
minutes or seconds) to customer demand per day (in relevant units).
Cycle time (C/T) Actual finish date – actual start date
or (available time – average down time – defects time)/schedule
volume
Production lead time It is the total time a component takes in its way through the shop floor,
(L/T) beginning with arrival of raw material to shipment of finished/semi
finished goods to customer.
Changeover time The time that a worker needs to switch from working at one operation
(C/O) to another, including demobilisation and mobilisation.
Value added time Time for which customer is willing to pay.
(VA)
Non-value added Normally includes waste.
time (NVA)
First time through The percentage of units that complete a process and meet quality
(FTT) guidelines at the first time. (not scrapped, rerun, retested, diverted for
offline repair, or returned).
Average throughput Average processing time/available resources.
time
Total throughput time No. of parts per day × average throughput time
Current state map It describes the existing position of shop floor of any manufacturing
facility.
Future state map It describes the proposed position of shop floor of any manufacturing
facility in order to bring improvements.

3 Research motivation and methodology

The automotive industry in India is one of the largest and fastest growing industries in the
world. India manufactures over 11 million vehicles every year (including two-wheeled)
and exports about 1.5 million every year. India’s passenger car and commercial vehicle
manufacturing industry is the seventh largest industry in the world, with an annual
production of more than 2.6 million units in 2009. In addition to this, there are
22 commercial vehicle manufacturers making Indian market very competitive. The surge
in number of households with higher purchasing power, strong growth of economy over
the past few years, abundant availability of labour at lower wages and low interest rates
have attracted almost all the major auto manufacturers to India (Narayanan and Vashisht,
2008). The near stagnant rate of growth in auto sector in markets of USA, EU and Japan
has acted as a push factor for shifting of new capacities and capital in the auto industry to
India. To maintain this high rate of growth, to retain the attractiveness of Indian market
and to further enhance the competitiveness of Indian companies, the Government of India
through the Development Council on Automobile and Allied Industries constituted a task
force to draw a ten year mission plan for the Indian automotive industry in 2006.
 Productivity and quality improvement through value stream mapping 293

However, the concept of attaining competitiveness on the basis of cheap and abundant
labour, low interest rates and concessional duty structure is becoming outdated and not
sustainable. In addition, automotive sector has a high employment generation potential.
As per the draft automotive mission plan 2006–2016, the automotive sector with its deep
backward (metals such as steel, aluminium, copper, etc., plastics, paint, glass, electronics,
capital equipment, trucking warehousing and logistics) and forward (dealership retails,
credit and financing, logistics, advertising, repair and maintenance, petroleum products,
gas stations, insurance, and service parts) linkages has been recognised and identified
at different forums (Development Council of Automobile and Allied Industries,
Planning Commission, National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council and Investment
Commission) as a sector with a very high potential to increase the share of manufacturing
in GDP, exports and employment.
Research and development (R&D) expenditure as a share of turnover is low in the
Indian auto-component sector ranging between 0% and 1.5% while it is 0.5%–3% for the
automobile sector as a whole. In fact, most of the smaller auto-component firms and a
few of the bigger ones do not have an R&D facility (Narayanan and Vashisht, 2008).
Policy intervention is urgently needed to improve the R&D activities in the Indian auto
industry or it has to do collaboration with research and technical institutions to improve
productivity, enhance quality and augment competitiveness without compromising profits
and increasing prices. At this critical junction of Indian automotive industry, lean
manufacturing is posited to be the right philosophy to identify all type of wastes and
remove them to improve productivity, quality and sustainability without additional
burden on material, energy and manpower requirements. Though the lean manufacturing
philosophy has been adopted across the world several years ago but most of the Indian
organisations have started lean manufacturing implementation in recent years. The
research methodology adopted for this work is outlined in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Research methodology outline

Literature review on lean and value stream mapping
↓
Select an organisation for case study
↓
Form a multifunctional team
↓
Select a critical product or product family
↓
Understand customer demand
↓
Map the process, material and information flow
↓
Calculate the total product cycle time
↓
Detail offline activities
↓
Draw the future state map
↓
Implement the improvements
↓
Analyse and improve further
294 J. Bhamu et al.

4 Implementation of VSM in an automotive industry: a case study

This section provides the case study of VSM implementation in an Indian automotive
company. The methodology is given below.

4.1 Selection of organisation

A case study was carried out for an Indian automotive company named XYZ. The
company has not been identified to maintain the confidentiality. The company, started in
1995, is a leading manufacturer of automobile components with annual turnover of about
50 million US dollars. It manufactures driveshaft components for domestic and export
market. This company faced a continuous increase in the demand from the customers in
early 2010 and meeting the customer demand was of high importance. The long lead
times, high in-process rejections and high work in process inventory were found to be
critical inhibitors to improve productivity in short span. So, it was decided to implement
VSM to meet the increased customer demand without any investment in man and
machinery.

4.2 Formation of team

In order to carry out this study, a cross-functional team was setup with the active support
of top management. The members of the team were drawn from various functions at
different hierarchy as shown in Figure 2. It took the cross functional team more than six
months to execute this project completely.

Figure 2 Selection of cross functional team for the case study

 
Production planning & 
control personnel 
Maintenance  Champion 
personnel 

Cross‐functional     
team  Managers 
Operators 

Quality inspectors  Supervisors 

4.3 Selection of product part family

The company manufactures driveshaft components for automotive sector and the product
families include various varieties of slip yokes, end yokes, flange yokes, tube yokes, tube
shafts, universal crosses, bearing cups and companion flanges. The in-process rejections
from January 2010 to July 2010 has resulted in cost of poor quality (COPQ) of
0.05 million US dollars. The COPQ for various cells from January 2010 to July 2010 is
 Productivity and quality improvement through value stream mapping 295

presented in Figure 3. This COPQ is attributed to the in-process rejections, so, decreasing
the in-process rejections is the best way to improve COPQ and productivity without
addition of resources. As seen from Figure 3, the slip yoke cell has maximum COPQ due
to maximum number of in-process rejections, so, this cell was chosen first to implement
VSM. Further, operationwise in-process rejection data was obtained to know the
contribution of various operations in the slip yoke cell in-process rejections.

Figure 3 Cost of poor quality for different product families in percentage (see online version
for colours)

4.4 Preparation and analysis of current state map

Next, general process flow chart (Figure 4) showing various operations performed from
raw material inspection to packing of the finished components in the slip yoke cell is
drawn.

Figure 4 Process flow chart of slip yoke cell

296 J. Bhamu et al.

To develop the current value stream map, the data was collected by the team members in
consultation with other workers, supervisors, engineers and managers. The production
per month of slip yoke was 26,000 pieces, effective number of working days per month
were 25, number of shifts per day were three and working hours per shift were seven. The
takt time comes out to be 72.69 seconds. The raw material requirement per month was
30,000 pieces. Some of the largest Indian automobile manufacturers are the customers to
this organisation and their tentative demand forecast for three months is received by the
production planning and control department through electronic mails. The supplier,
located at a distance of about 450 km, supplies seven deliveries per week in trucks to the
company for inward inspection and storage. Each delivery consists of 1,000 pieces. The
raw material supplier is then informed of the consolidated monthly demand by XYZ Ltd.
However, raw material inventory for one day is kept in stores for contingencies. The
material from supplier is tested by the quality control department and then sent to vendor
for initial roughing operations (outsourced). The material comes back for in-house
operations after inspection (one truck delivery per day). Rest of the operations/processes
(process 1 to process 7) are then completed in-house as shown in the current value stream
map (Figure 5). The WIP inventory is shown between the processes. The lead time and
cycle time per operation are shown over the time line. Total cycle time is calculated to be
351 seconds and total lead time is 6.2 days. This current state map helps to visualise the
present situation and the areas where improvements are needed. The current state map
shows that there is a scope of improvement in lead time and value added time (VA %) as
there is lot of unnecessary delay and storage between the operations, components move a
long distances on the shop floor and change over time is high in processes 1 and 2. The
sun bursts indicate the improvements to be made or kaizens to be implemented.

4.5 Improvement of current VSM and development of future VSM

To meet the current customer demand, the production has to be increased from existing
26,000 pieces per month to 30,000 pieces per month. It is very important to reduce the
in-process rejections from the value chain to achieve this target. A root cause analysis
was performed for all major in-process rejections in the slip yoke cell. An illustrative
example of this root cause analysis is shown in Figure 6 for bore oversize. One of the
major causes for bore oversize rejections was found to be non-usage of flat base probe
during the machine set up. The operating engineer could not determine the exact offset to
be given to obtain the required bore diameter with the existing probe as the area of
contact between the probe and insert was very less which resulted in improper offset
setting. In order to overcome this problem, flat base probes were ordered and made
available for bore setting so that proper offsets could be given to avoid rejections due to
bore oversize. Apart from this, it was also observed that first piece inspection was not
being done. Hence, daily audit for first piece inspection was started. Now, first piece
stands are welded on all the machines of slip yoke cell to ensure that the first piece is
clearly visible to the operator and the quality engineer. This has also prevented the
problem of mix up of components. Similar root cause analyses were performed for bore
damage, bore cut out, turning diameter undersize, turning diameter damage, thread major
diameter undersize, grinding outer diameter undersize, etc. Corrective actions or the
improvement activities were detailed and performed. The future value stream map thus
developed is shown in Figure 7.
 Productivity and quality improvement through value stream mapping 297

Figure 5 Current value stream map for slip yoke cell (see online version for colours)
298 J. Bhamu et al.

Figure 6 Root cause analysis for bore oversize

 Productivity and quality improvement through value stream mapping 299

Figure 7 Future value stream map for slip yoke cell

300 J. Bhamu et al.

5 Results and discussion

The main objective of meeting the customer demand of 30,000 pieces per month from the
existing capacity of 26,000 pieces per month without addition of resources has been met
with the implementation of VSM in the slip yoke cell. The reduction of the in-process
rejections has improved the cost of poor quality from an initial value of US $5,737 in
August 2010 to a value US $3,546 in the month of November 2010 as shown in Figure 8.
A similar trend has been noticed for the in-process rejections as shown in Figure 9. The
in-process rejections reduced from 615 to 442 in the same period. This reduction has
been possible because of the preventions of bore oversize, bore damage, bore cut out,
turning diameter undersize, turning diameter damage, thread major diameter undersize
and grinding outer diameter undersize. This has been achieved due to the identification of
root causes and the elimination of these causes by implementation of simple kaizens like
compulsory first piece inspection, standard operating procedures, one point lessons,
improved and visible control plans, on-job training, online measurements, IT enabled
services, etc.

Figure 8 Cost of poor quality trends (US $) (see online version for colours)

Figure 9 In-process rejection trends (quantity) (see online version for colours)
 Productivity and quality improvement through value stream mapping 301

The total lead time has decreased from 6.2 days to 4.9 days as shown in Figure 10,
mainly, because of reduction of changeover from two to one in turning and
boring/grooving processes; reduction in changeover time in boring/grooving process
from 45 minutes to 30 minutes; reduction of material movements in the cell from 181 feet
to 47 feet; implementation of one-piece flow between turning and boring/grooving
process (from 0.5 days to 0.3 days), between boring/grooving and grinding process
(from 0.3 days to zero days) and between size broaching and Welch plug pressing (from
0.3 days to zero days). The application of the VSM in the slip yoke cell has improved
value addition by a robust 27% (from 7.42% to 9.47%) as shown in Figure 11. The work
in process (WIP) inventory level has been brought down from 6,990 components to 5,000
components (Figure 12) mainly due to reduction in raw material storage after inward
inspection (from 1,200 components to 600 components) and introduction of one-piece
flow between turning and boring/grooving (from 300 components to zero components);
boring/grooving and grinding (from 350 components to zero components); size broaching
and Welch plug pressing (from 300 components to zero components); Welch plug
pressing and packing (from 300 components to zero components) as shown in value
stream maps. The distance travelled by the component in the plant from first process to
last process has been reduced from 181 feet to 47 feet (Figure 13) by changing the cell
layout and reducing the distances between spline broaching and turning (from 30 feet to
8 feet), between grinding and size broaching (from 50 feet to 5 feet) and Welch plug
pressing and packing (from 70 feet to 3 feet). This has also reduced the mix-up of
components, employee fatigue and WIP inventory. The percentage scrap has been
reduced from 1.33% to 0.55% (Figure 14) mainly because of the improvements done in
turning process (from 3,777 ppm to 1,947 ppm), boring process (from 6,198 ppm to
4,023 ppm) and grinding (from 1,392 ppm to 512 ppm). The first time throughput has
been improved in almost all processes.

Figure 10 Lead time in days (see online version for colours)

302 J. Bhamu et al.

Figure 11 Percentage value additions (see online version for colours)

Figure 12 WIP inventory in numbers (see online version for colours)

The case study has illustrated, through implementation of VSM, how managers can
develop and refine the manufacturing processes to reduce overall waste, which helps
them to compete in the market. The VSM depicts the whole process visually which
assists decision makers to identify and eliminate the waste at micro level. The reduction
in overall waste facilitates the organisations to improve their bottom lines without
additional resources. This paper has also demonstrated the usefulness of multifunctional
teams in identification of the various root causes of in-process rejections. The VSM
implementation in one cell helped the management to convenience the operators and
 Productivity and quality improvement through value stream mapping 303

managers in other cells that the implementation of simple kaizens in term of one-piece
flow, first piece inspection, daily audit, standard operating procedure, on-job training,
visual management, kanban, etc. will improve their productivity and quality.

Figure 13 Distance travelled by the component in feet (see online version for colours)

Figure 14 Percentage scrap (see online version for colours)

304 J. Bhamu et al.

6 Conclusions

This paper demonstrates the application of value stream mapping to improve productivity
and quality through a case study of an Indian automotive company. A comprehensible
trend in the reduction of cost of poor quality and in-process rejections has been
established since the implementation of VSM. It clearly exhibits 27% improvement in
value addition (%VA), 21% reduction in lead time, 29% reduction in work in process
inventory, 74% reduction in distance travelled by the component in the plant, and 59%
reduction in percentage scrap. The study has illustrated the usefulness of VSM in
identification and elimination of waste at micro level to help managers to improve
productivity and quality. The usefulness of multifunctional teams in development of
simple kaizens in term of one-piece flow, first piece inspection, daily audit, standard
operating procedure, on-job training, visual management, kanban, etc. has also been
demonstrated.
The scope of this study was limited to the organisation’s internal processes, i.e., from
receipt of the raw material to the manufacture of the part. It could be interesting to
include full supply chain in the scope of the study. The effect of VSM implementation on
agility and flexibility of an organisation should also be studied. Moreover, this study is
limited to the VSM implementation in one cell. Productivity and quality can further be
improved by implementing VSM in other cells. More research needs to be done to study
the effect of VSM implementation on humans.

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to the anonymous reviewers for reviewing the paper in a short
span of time. Their constructive critical reviews have helped the authors to improve the
readability and quality of the paper.

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