We Have Lean Tools for That--The Current State, That Is!
For those of you just starting out on a Lean journey, these are the Lean tools you should use to perform a thorough assessment of the current state:
Tool 1: Value Stream Mapping (For a review of how to do this read the Blog article: Value Stream Mapping-a Lean Assessment Tool)
Tool 2: Spaghetti Diagramming 
Tool 3: Calculate Customer TAKT Time
Tool 4: Tube Travel Diagrams
Tool 5: Count and Photograph Inventory--Specimens, Consumables, Reagents
Tool 6: Calculate Your Current Production Cycle Time
The findings from this assessment will help you and y
our team brainstorm process improvement opportunities (kaizen events) over the span of about one year. The next year, you do it all over again......continuous process improvement.
