Creating Continuous Flow (EN)

Continuous Flow: Going Deeper - A Practical Workbook for Real Lean Flow"
This workbook guides you step by step to the essence of Continuous Flow, richly illustrated with real-life case studies, clear diagrams and clear overviews.

Flow is one of the best-known elements within Lean. Continuous flow is the third of the five principles of Womack and Jones in Lean Thinking. Value Stream Mapping leads you to determine which parts of the value stream you want to bring into continuous flow. But what is continuous flow actually?

The first workbook in the series, Learning to See, starts from the perspective of the total value stream, after which continuous flow is one of the three main elements of the future state. But in practice, creating true flow turns out to be anything but easy. Although many Lean training courses and simulations introduce the concept of flow, they result in what this workbook astutely calls "fake flow. With the best of intentions, processes are seemingly juxtaposed, but the deeper essence of flow is missing. This workbook reveals the three essential elements of true flow: material flow, information flow and the flow of people. Each of these elements is thoroughly analyzed, quantified and taught to improve in concrete terms.

This underscores why flow deserves its own dedicated workbook. Step by step, this book teaches you how to actually create continuous flow in your organization. In addition, you will deepen your understanding of crucial aspects such as:

• how to create flow when you don't have a repetitive process
• how to maintain flow when customer demand varies
• 4 levels of automation, and how to choose
• how flow differs from (most forms of) line balancing
• how to develop Standardised Work
• how to get people to continuously improve towards more flow
• how to manage a continuous flow cell
• how to deal with problems

The title chosen, "Creating Continuous Flow" rather than "Implementing Continuous Flow," is deliberate and crucial. After all, continuous flow is not a standard blueprint that you can just "implement. There are always real causes and valid reasons why it may be complex in a given situation. So this workbook does not teach you to 'implement' flow, but to learn to see and understand what needs to change in your situation in such a way that flow is then indeed possible.

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