BUSI 3010 Week 2 Swimlane Process Map Example

A Swimlane Process Map of One Kitchen Countertop Job at a Stone Fabrication Shop: Twenty-One Boxes, Four Decisions With Both Branches Drawn and Six Forward Handoffs Between Lanes

Student Name

Walden University

BUSI 3010: Operations Management

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Swimlane Process Map of One Kitchen Countertop Job at a Stone Fabrication Shop: Twenty-One Boxes, Four Decisions With Both Branches Drawn and Six Forward Handoffs Between Lanes

Scope of the Map

This map follows a single kitchen order through Red River Stone & Surface, the composite Fargo shop studied all term. The job starts when the customer signs the order and pays the deposit and ends when the installation crew leaves the house and the customer signs the completion form. Billing after installation is outside the map. The map follows the work as it moves between seven lanes: the customer, sales, the templater, programming, the fabrication floor, quality and installation.

The map was built by following four jobs through the shop in September and October and by asking the person in each lane what they do, what they wait for and whom they hand the job to. Where the four jobs differed, the map shows the most common path and notes the exceptions.

The Map

Because the course format calls for a table rather than a drawing, each row below is one box or diamond on the swimlane chart. Steps are written as verbs. Decisions are marked with a question and show where each branch goes. A handoff is any row where the next step sits in a different lane.

Table 1

Swimlane Map of a Kitchen Countertop Job

Red River Stone & Surface is composite; step numbers correspond to boxes on the swimlane chart.

Reading the Map

The main path runs from step 1 to step 21 through thirteen task boxes. Four decisions branch off it. At step 5, the templater checks whether the cabinets match the drawing the customer approved; in two of the four jobs followed, they did not, usually because a cabinet had been moved during installation, and the job went back through sales for a layout change. At step 8, programming checks whether the chosen slab is in the yard; if not, the job waits three to six working days for delivery. At step 16, the lead fabricator decides whether each piece passes; a chip on an edge goes back for re-polishing, while a cracked piece goes back to the beginning of fabrication on a new slab. At step 19, the installation crew confirms the day before that the plumber has disconnected the sink and the old tops are removed; if not, the installation is rescheduled.

Each decision has both branches drawn, and each branch leads somewhere. Two of them, steps 5 and 19, send the job back through sales, which means a person who is not involved in the work is the one who restarts it.

Where the Work Changes Hands

The forward path crosses lanes six times: customer to sales, sales to the templater, the templater to programming, programming to the fabrication floor, fabrication to quality, and quality to installation. The rework loops add more crossings, back to sales at steps 6 and 20 and back to fabrication at step 17. Rummler and Brache (1995) argued that many performance problems sit in the "white space" between departments on an organization chart, where work passes from one group to another and nobody owns the gap. On this shop floor, the same white space appears between benches rather than between departments. At each handoff, the job sits in someone's queue, and nobody tracks how long it waits there.

The most important wait is step 12, which is drawn as its own box because it is where the job spends the most time. In the four jobs followed, pieces waited on a cart beside the CNC for between nine and twenty-two working hours. No other wait between fabrication steps exceeded three hours. The step people complain about, templating, involves a one-week wait for a visit, but that wait happens before step 3 and is a scheduling queue, not a processing one.

Limits of the Diagram

The map shows sequence and ownership but not time, except where a wait was large enough to draw. It also hides two exceptions. Large jobs with three or more slabs sometimes skip the cart at step 12 because the CNC operator moves them ahead, and remnant jobs, small vanity tops cut from leftover stone, skip steps 8 and 9 entirely. Damelio (2011) recommends mapping the process as it actually runs before drawing the improved version, and this map is deliberately the current state. Hammer (1990) argued that many processes carry steps that exist only because of old constraints, and the two loops back through sales may be examples worth questioning later in the course.

Checking the Map Against the Narrative

Every step in the table appears in the narrative, and every branch described in the narrative appears in the table. The count is twenty-one rows: thirteen task boxes on the main path, four decisions and four rework or delay boxes (steps 6, 9, 17 and 20). Next week, the map will be used to locate the constraint by timing each processing step.

References

Damelio, R. (2011). The basics of process mapping (2nd ed.). Productivity Press.

Hammer, M. (1990). Reengineering work: Don't automate, obliterate. Harvard Business Review, 68(4), 104-112.

Rummler, G. A., & Brache, A. P. (1995). Improving performance: How to manage the white space on the organization chart (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass.