Value Streams: Unlocking AI’s Value

Value Stream Management unlocks an organisation's most valuable AI Use Cases. This insight covers the key details you need to know.

What is a Value Stream?

Gartner defines a value stream as the map of each step needed for a company to deliver a product, service, or experience to a customer. They connect different teams and systems, ensuring a smooth workflow from customer request to delivery. They help businesses see the whole journey, rather than the individual tasks; from creation, to marketing, selling, and customer service. By mapping out each step in a Value Stream, business can then work to improve the process. That could involve identifying inefficiencies, ensuring each step is customer-orientated, or figuring out where to invest in improvements that will create the maximum value.

Defining the Value Stream

Value Stream Management (VSM) is a management practice that structures the improvement of a Value Stream. The aim is to deliver better value to customers through optimising the entire end-to-end process of delivering a product or service. Proper and thorough VSM identifies bottlenecks and enhances operational flow, thus reducing waste and improving service quality.

Here’s a more detailed breakdown:

Key Concepts:

• Value Stream: A series of activities that collectively create value for the customer, from initial idea to delivery.
• Value Stream Mapping: A visual representation of the steps involved in a value stream, highlighting areas of waste and potential improvements.
• Waste Reduction: VSM seeks to identify and eliminate non-value-added activities, such as unnecessary handoffs, delays, and defects.
• Process Optimisation: VSM focuses on streamlining workflows, improving communication, and automating tasks to enhance efficiency.
• Customer Focus: VSM prioritizes understanding customer needs and ensuring that products or services meet their requirements.

Benefits of Value Stream Management:

• Improved Efficiency: VSM eliminates waste and streamlines processes, significantly improving efficiency and productivity.
• Reduced Lead Time: By using VSM to reduce the time it takes to deliver products or services to customers, organizations can respond more quickly to market demands.
• Enhanced Quality: Proper VSM places heavy focus on increasing quality at each stage of the value stream, ensuring that products or services are delivered with minimal defects and high customer satisfaction.
• Increased Customer Satisfaction: With customer needs and delivering efficient value at the forefront, VSM helps organizations enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Improved Collaboration: VSM can facilitate better comms and collaboration between internal teams and departments, which in turn creates effective, efficient workflows.

Applications of Value Stream Management

A wide range of industries can and do take advantage of VSM, including;

• Software Development: OpenText and Atlassian highlight the use of VSM in software development to improve the flow of development and delivery.
• Manufacturing: Wikipedia mentions that value stream mapping is often associated with manufacturing to improve operational efficiency.
• Healthcare: Patient flows can be optimised, improving both the quality and speed of care or treatment.
• Finance: VSM streamlines processes and improves financial reporting.
• Retail: Uses VSM to optimize inventory management and improve customer service.

In summary, Value Stream Management is a truly powerful management technique. It helps organizations focus on what would best help the customer; channelling time, energy, and funds into the optimisations that matter.

Define ‘Winning’ AI Use Cases using Value Streams

A mapped out Value Stream allows for the analysis of every stage in a business workflow. It shows where delays, manual work, or repetitive tasks are slowing things down. It makes inefficiencies visible; pinpointing the areas that AI automation or data analytics could improve. These pain points are obvious targets for an organisation’s AI Use Case!

Many companies of late are rushing to implement AI simply to keep pace with industry trends, wasting time and resources on unnecessary tools. To reap the truly incredible ROI AI can offer, organisations must start with proper identification of the most valuable Use Cases. For example, a company receiving relatively few customer enquiries per week ought not to invest in a complex customer service chatbot. Not when those same investments could be funnelled instead into an AI system that structures company data and automates the maintenance of it – creating potentially company-wide efficiency improvements.

At Fidra Analytics, we take a unique approach to Use Case identification. We work closely with our clients to find their drivers for AI adoption, from which usually springs the most valuable Use Cases. As part of this process we start by finding the DRIVER (then move on to Use Cases).

Based on our experience with customers, the top 5 most common AI adoption drivers are;

• Enhancing Operational Efficiency
• Improving Customer Experience
• Driving Innovation and Competitive Advantage
• Data Driven Decision Making
• Compliance and Risk Management

The Fidra Approach – Step 1: Discovery Session

The very first step in our AI Journey is the Discovery Session which focusses entirely on identifying the AI Use Cases that will add the most value to our customer.

Our aims of that 2-3 hour session include:

• Understanding the problem(s) you are trying to solve via some ‘value stream’ identification
• Measuring the current ways of working and identifying areas of waste and inefficiency
• Defining the new potential ways of working and opportunities for Analytics, AI (or something else)
• Clarifying how you will measure efficacy of Analytics, AI (or something else)
• Outlining expectations and setting goals
• Define the scope of the subsequent Proof of Concept (in our AI Journey, we call this the Accelerator)

BOOK YOUR DISCOVERY SESSION TODAY!

Working with Fidra unlocks the ‘art of the possible’. Get in touch to book you FREE OF CHARGE session with one of our AI Solution Architects . Our focus is on finding the AI use cases that will generate the most business value for our clients. If you have any questions or comments, please reach out to us – info@fidra.ai

Back to Insights