What is Value Stream Mapping — and How to Run One in 5 Steps

The Problem with Being Inside the Process

I was standing in a financial services office watching their accounts payable team work through invoices. Each person was busy. Everyone looked productive. But invoices were taking 14 days to process, and clients were calling daily asking about payment status.

The problem was obvious once we mapped it out. But when you’re inside a process, handling your piece of it every day, you can’t see the whole picture. You can’t see the three-day wait between approval and data entry. You can’t see that invoices sit in email inboxes for two days before anyone touches them.

This is exactly why Value Stream Mapping exists.

What Value Stream Mapping Actually Shows You

Value Stream Mapping is a Lean tool that draws out the entire flow of a process — from the moment a customer makes a request to the moment you deliver value back to them. It captures every step, every wait time, every handoff, and every approval.

Most importantly, it makes waste visible that you cannot see when you’re buried in the daily work.

In that financial services example, we discovered that out of 14 total days, only 4 hours were spent on actual work. The rest was waiting, searching for information, or sitting in someone’s inbox. When you map this visually, the waste jumps off the page.

The 5-Step Process We Use

Step 1: Define Your Product Family

Pick one type of work that flows through your organization. Don’t try to map everything at once — you’ll get overwhelmed and quit.

For our financial services client, we focused specifically on vendor invoice processing. Not expense reports. Not purchase orders. Just vendor invoices from receipt to payment.

Step 2: Map the Current State

Walk the process from start to finish. Talk to every person who touches it. Time each step. Count the wait times.

We discovered their current state had 12 different handoffs, 3 approval layers, and invoices that got “lost” in email for days. The total lead time was 14 days, but the actual work time was 4 hours.

Draw this out using simple boxes for process steps and triangles for waiting areas. Include the actual numbers — how long each step takes, how long things wait, how often mistakes happen.

Step 3: Identify Waste and Root Causes

Look for the classic wastes: waiting, overprocessing, defects, unnecessary motion, and overproduction. But go deeper than just spotting waste — figure out why it exists.

In our example, invoices waited in email because people didn’t know they had arrived. Approvals took days because managers were traveling and checking email once daily. Data entry happened in batches once per week instead of continuously.

Step 4: Design the Future State

This is where you redesign the flow to eliminate waste. Not just reduce it — eliminate it where possible.

We redesigned their process to have automatic email notifications, approval limits that eliminated unnecessary sign-offs, and daily data entry instead of weekly batches. The new flow had 5 handoffs instead of 12.

Step 5: Build an Implementation Plan

Break the future state into specific, measurable changes you can implement in 30-60-90 day chunks. Assign owners. Set dates.

We started with the email notifications and approval limits — changes that required no technology. Then we tackled the batching problem and finally the workflow redesign.

The Results That Matter

Six months later, that same financial services team was processing invoices in 3 days instead of 14. More importantly, they could see problems immediately instead of discovering them two weeks later.

The accounts payable manager told me this was the first process improvement project that actually stuck. Previous consultants had given them recommendations that gathered dust. But because we mapped the current state together and they could see the waste for themselves, they owned the solution.

Value Stream Mapping works because it makes the invisible visible. Once people see how much time their work spends waiting around, they can’t unsee it. They start asking better questions about why things work the way they do.

Where to Start

Pick a process that frustrates your customers or your team. Something that takes too long or creates too many problems. Map it exactly as it works today — not how you think it works or how it’s supposed to work.

The truth about most processes is that they evolved accidentally over time. Someone left, so we added an approval step. A mistake happened once, so we added a verification step. These patches accumulate until your process is drowning in waste.

If you’re ready to see what’s really happening in your critical processes, we should talk. We run Value Stream Mapping sessions that get your team aligned on both the problems and the solutions. Book a free call at strategypeeps.com/contact and we’ll walk through how this could work in your organization.