It would be my contention that Dr. W. Edwards Deming drew the first value stream map. I have in my possession a copy of his 1982 book, Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position. This book summarized Dr. Deming’s thoughts and a lot of what he presented in his 4-day seminars in the early years. Later, he published Out of The Crisis and then The New Economics.
In the 1982 book you can find this diagram (Chapter 6, “A View of How Quality Began in Japan”)
Dr. Deming had made attempts to introduce his thinking in the United States. He states, “Brilliant applications burned, sputtered, fizzled, and died out. What the men did was to solve individual problems. Control charts proliferated, the more the better. Quality control departments sprouted. They plotted charts, looked at them, and filed them. They took quality control away from everybody else, which of course was entirely wrong, as quality control is everybody’s job. There was no structure to teach management their responsibilities.”
He goes on to say, “It was vital not to repeat in Japan the mistakes made in America. Management must understand their responsibilities. The problem was how to reach top management in Japan. This hurdle was accomplished through the offices of Mr. Ichiro Ishikawa, president of the great Kei-dan-ren (Federated Economic Societies), and president of JUSE.”
The figure of the organization as a system was introduced in conferences in 1950 and later to show “the responsibility of management to institute constancy of purpose toward service, to improve the system through all stages of production, and to managed the use of statistical quality technology company-wide, from procurement of materials to the consumer, consumer research, innovation, and redesign of product. The message to put before them was that management must understand that the consumer is the most important part of the production line.”
When I look up “the history of value stream mapping” on line, I find citations that go to the 1980s where Taiichi Ohno and sensei Shigeo Shingo used these methods in the Toyota production system for waste identification and removal.
So where did Ohono, Shingo and others in Japan get this horizontal view? I’d say it came from the Dr. Deming who drew the first value stream map.
