Value analysis not just about product evaluation, selection

It’s about eliminating all waste and inefficiency in your supply streams … FAST

by Robert T. Yokl

Just the other day, a value analysis team leader that we were coaching asked us if it would be okay if his value analysis team started to look at the processes surrounding the products, services and technology his team was charged with to uncover any and all waste and inefficiency in their supply streams.

We were delighted to hear this team leader was moving in this direction since value analysis isn’t just about product, service or technology evaluation and selection. It’s all about reducing your total cost from acquisition to disposition of your products, services and technologies.

We therefore have encouraged all of our value analysis clients not to isolate their product, service and technology investigations to the commodities themselves, but to instead dig deeper and broader into their value stream to eliminate any and all waste and inefficiency that might reside there hidden from their view.

Process value analysis

Long before anyone had even heard the words "process mapping" there was a value analysis methodology developed by Charles W. Bytheway, value engineering seminar director of UNIVAC, called FAST (Functional Analysis Systems Technique) Diagraming. In my opinion, it is the best value stream mapping "made simple" tool available today for value analysis practitioners to squeeze the towel dry in supply chain savings.

I can make this declarative statement since I have employed numerous value stream mapping tools (including Lean SixSigma tools) in my 27-year consulting career and hands-down the FAST Diagram is the easiest one I have found to learn, understand and then quickly generate results in the shortest time. I have taught the FAST Diagraming technique in just a few hours to my clients and they are ready to run with it without getting confused with all of the jargon and complexity of many other popular tools on the market today.

If you’re not familiar with FAST Diagraming you can Google it and find hundreds of articles and examples on how it works. In short, it will enable a value analysis practitioner to identify each function, in a logical sequence, prioritize them and then test their dependency, efficacy and relative worth to your customers, in any value stream process under investigation. In this way, you can more skillfully understand the complexity of your value stream processes as opposed to becoming preoccupied and paralyzed with methods and practices of flow-charting or traditional process mapping.

By employing FAST Diagrams my firm has documented up to 23 percent in process improvements (time, labor and resources) in any supply chain process that we have studied over the years. More importantly, we have never found a "dry hole" in any study to date, which is proof positive to me that FAST Diagrams work.

FAST results

I once employed a FAST Diagram to determine why one of my clients was spending $185,536 on a form my client called their "General Requisition" that I was told was used for "results reporting" for their hospital’s diagnostic tests (e.g., lab, X-ray, pulmonary, etc.). However, when I identified the functions of the form and then observed the process in which the form was used I found that the form no longer was used for "results reporting" but for "requesting tests." Since the form was originally constructed for "results reporting" it didn’t need all of the features (e.g., punched holes, color bars, name of hospital, etc.) that were originally designed into it.

Through observation and interviews, I also discovered that for every form that was printed on their hospital’s 36 nursing floor printers a second form was printed needlessly and thrown away or used as scrap paper by my client’s nursing staff. As hard as this is to believe no one reported this problem to this hospital’s IT department until we showed up on the scene. The bottom line was that we were able to save our client $93,994 annually on this form when all of our recommendations were implemented.

So if you want to mine even more savings for your value analysis program, don’t have your value analysis teams stop your value analysis studies at the product, service or technology evaluation/selection phase of your studies. Have them move on to the next phase of your study — process improvement — with FAST Diagrams. It will save you tens-of-thousands of dollars, maybe even millions by doing so! I can guarantee it