Many people believe that to apply Value Stream Marketing using Lean Techniques is about removing waste. Eliminating waste is one of the Guiding Principles of Value Stream Marketing but you must make some fundamental improvements in your marketing cycle before a pull marketing system will work. Value Stream Marketing (VSM) is about having a minimum amount of Work in Process (WIP). However, you cannot just wake up one morning and decide to do it. You cannot just remove marginal leads or work with only higher valued leads. It’s about a journey versus the decision to reduce your WIP. Managing your WIP will make you aware of many wasteful processes and as a result provide opportunity to remove them.
In VSM there are four critical components that you must understand: Protect Sales, Reduce your WIP, Improve your Cycle Time and Remove waste.
Remove Waste
Contrary to a whole lot of Lean folks, I believe waste is an afterthought in Lean. After you Protect Sales, Reduce WIP and Improve your Marketing Cycle, waste will appear, and appear again, and again. When it seems like low hanging fruit remove it, but not before. Your challenge is not removing waste but increasing flow, reducing variation and creating reliability. Ultimately you will find waste in the number of prospects within your marketing cycle, your WIP!
The more WIP (more inventory): the more variation and less reliability you have will cause a reduction of flow. Forecasts will be off or non-existent even though we will have a considerable number of prospects. Start focusing on your lead times and waste will disappear.
If you don’t believe me and you still want to get rid of some waste here is my stab at it. The seven types of waste in manufacturing are well known: overproduction, waiting, transport, extra processing, inventory, motion, and defects. The seven types of waste for marketing streams are:
- Overproduction as a result of too much work in process
- Waiting as a result of poor flow and lack of leveling demand. I discourage the concept that we should not have slack in a system and idle time.
- Complexity poor scheduling systems that prevent flow
- Extra Processing responding to the marketing idea of the week. .
- Poor Handoffs are created as you move from one step of the process to another. This results in delays and incorrect information.
- Inventory to much Work in Process(WIP)
- Push Marketing pushing marketing processes and material onto prospects and customer that are not asking for it.
As mentioned before these concepts should become apparent as you work through the three preceding steps. Value Stream Marketing is not about removing waste as the first step. It is about creating awareness of each value stream so that you can determine the value of your marketing from the customers’ point of view.
This is the #4 of a 4 part series.
Related Posts:
The Guiding Principles of Value Stream Marketing