Spaghetti Diagram acts as a great ally in layout optimization projects
Understand what Spaghetti Diagram is and its relationship with improvement processes. Learn how to do it and be able to analyze and optimize the layout of your business.
Have you ever heard of Spaghetti Diagram? Oh, my God! It's even hungry now!
But calm down, today we're going to talk about a Lean Manufacturing tool, not that delicious Sunday lunch noodle!
Spaghetti Diagram is an essential tool for companies that want to remain competitive by eliminating waste, because this tool attacks one of the 8 wastes listed by the Lean methodology: unnecessary movements.
Were you curious to know how? Keep reading the article. In it you will learn:
- What is Spaghetti Diagram?
- What is the Spaghetti Diagram for?
- How to make a spaghetti diagram
- Software to create a Spaghetti Diagram
- Example of a process optimized by Spaghetti Diagram.
Prepared?
What is Spaghetti Diagram?
Spaghetti Diagram is a very important visual tool for the Lean Manufacturing segment.
It consists of a tangle of drawn lines, usually on an A3-shaped plant. The lines represent the entire trajectory traveled by an employee in a company during the execution of tasks of a given process.
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How to make a spaghetti diagram?
What you need to do is: draw a map that contains all the paths taken by people and/or products. But be careful!
If you make your diagram anyway, this simple tool can become very confusing and extremely difficult to analyze. That's why I'm going to help with a very good recipe for making your spaghetti. Let's go?
Step 1: Decide which process or flow of people will be analyzed. It is important, and also necessary, to evaluate how much value the change in this layout will add to the business.
Step 2: After deciding on the layout to be optimized, it is necessary to design the plan for it, maintaining all the current characteristics of the system. This schematic is done, as said before, in an A3 format.
Step 3: Draw, continuously, the entire path traveled by the employee and/or material to represent the entire flow of the process, defining well the distances traveled and the time spent on each one. If necessary, use more than one color to represent them.
Step 4: Make, together with your work team, a careful analysis of the paths designed seeking to identify unnecessary and improvable movements. Don't forget to take into account the time and distance harvested in the previous step.
Step 5: Look for an organization that reduces as much as possible all undesirable paths, preparing proposals that meet industry employees and achieve the expected levels of improvement.
Some other factors also help to assemble a Spaghetti Diagram and therefore facilitate decision-making. Among them, it is worth mentioning:
- Describe well all the stopping points, or bottlenecks, between processes and also the time spent on each one
- Analyze the tasks of the current layout that require resources from other sectors.
- Seek to transform the production system or administrative environment as linear as possible
- Eliminate all steps that do not add value to the product.
Software to create the Spaghetti Diagram
Several software’s can help create more complex and complete spaghetti diagrams. Among them are:
Microsoft Visio: a complete and easy-to-use tool that has several templates from the most diverse areas, such as offices and factories.
AutoCAD: a technical tool that is more complex than the previous one, it presents excellent results in terms of detail.
Process example optimized by Spaghetti Diagram
The image below shows a process before (left) and after (on the right) application of the spaghetti diagram:
In this application, it is possible to observe the great reduction in movement that was made possible through the analysis of the Diagram.
I bet you're now going to prepare such a spaghetti!
After a good look at the image above, it is very clear the importance of this tool for systems that use Lean Manufacturing.
Spaghetti Diagram helps the work team see how they can rearrange craft sites, seeking to improve process efficiency, reducing and even eliminating all waste.
If you want to learn more about other Lean Manufacturing tools, here at Voitto we have what you need!
Adopt Lean Manufacturing to reduce waste!
Porter's Five Forces model has as main purpose to relate the company to its organizational environment, analyzing its internal and external environment, through five criteria: Suppliers, New Entrants, Buyers (Customers), Substitute Products / Services and Competitors.
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