Untangle your Process: Spaghetti Diagram

By David McGiverin

Spaghetti Diagrams help reveal opportunities to reduce or eliminate the steps and time associated with certain activities such as movement of materials or information.  It's amazing the number of excess steps it takes to accomplish a particular activity in our day-to-day lives at home or at work. This technique is extremely useful when watching people in a plant perform activities within their scope of work, or tracking the movement of product.  By tracing and analyzing their steps you will discover potential improvements that will help employees work “smarter” and accomplish more in less time.

Applications:

* Administration
* Manufacturing
* Services

Major Steps:

* Obtain or Draw a floor layout of the observation area
* Trace the movement of materials and people
* Measure the overall activities distance
* Target improvement opportunities
* Select and make the immediate improvements with the biggest payoffs

The following examples shows the number and distance ECO’s (Engineering Change Orders) went through during the time of observation-


Before Improvement:
Diagram

After Improvement:
Diagram