When looking at any existing process, people often have a hard time visualizing the enormous amount of delay, waste, and nonvalue-added work involved. That’s where a time value map comes in; it makes the invisible waste visible. A time value map shows value-added and nonvalue-added activities and delays.

The 3–57 rule

Managers often say: “My people are busy.” But when you follow a work product through a process, you soon discover that people may only be working on it for three minutes out of every hour. The other 57 minutes are preventable delays. A time value map helps illustrate this problem.

Here is an example of a time value map. Any bar above the center line is value-added (VA). Any bar below the center line is nonvalue-added (NVA). The center line represents the timeline for the process, from start to finish. The gaps between bars are assumed to be no-value added delays (i.e., queue or wait times) and can be eliminated with value stream mapping and spaghetti diagramming. From a lean perspective, the goal is to eliminate the NVA and delays to accelerate the process.

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