How to create continuous flow

Practical workbook about Continuous Flow based on a practical case, amply provided with illustrations, diagrams and 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 it's not that simple in practice. Almost every training and simulation in the field of Lean also introduces the concept of flow. In the vast majority of cases this leads to what is called fake flow in this book: with the best intentions we place processes next to each other, but there is still no real flow. In reality, flow consists of three elements (flow of materials, flow of information and flow of people), each of which can be analyzed, quantified and of course greatly improved.

In short, there is much more important to learn about flow and therefore this topic deserves its own workbook. Step by step, this book explains how to create continuous flow. En passant you learn:

• 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 of this book was deliberately chosen as well. It is not called 'Implementing Continuous Flow' but 'Creating Continuous Flow'. Continuous flow can never be implemented - there are always many real causes and valid reasons that make it impossible in a certain situation. 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 possible.

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