Mellan karta och verklighet : En fallstudie om variation i manuella materialhanteringsprocesser och begränsningar i värdeflödesanalyser

Sammanfattning

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a well-established Lean tool used to map material- and information flows within an organization and to identify waste. However, simplified representations of processes may limit the ability to expose variation within individual process steps, especially in environments characterized by low production volume and high product variation. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate to what extent VSM captures variation within a manual material handling process. This thesis was conducted as a qualitative case study at HMS Networks in Halmstad, where the department Work Order Preparation (WOP) was selected as the unit of analysis. Data collection was carried out through observations, interviews, workshops, process mapping and internal documents. To investigate identified variation in the manual material handling process, improvement kata was applied as an experiment-based and iterative method. The experiment was designed based on identified obstacles and theory regarding human factors and Lean material supply. The results of the study shows that existing VSM provided an overall picture of the main process flow within the organization, but it did not capture significant variation within the studied process step. Furthermore, interruptions and variation work execution contributed to reduced process stability and increased the risk of errors. Through the application of improvement kata, variations and process conditions that were invisible in the original VSM were exposed. The study therefore indicates that VSM may need to be complemented with more in-depth process analysis and further development of mapping symbols in order to provide a more accurate representation of variation in complex organizations.