Focussing the lean enterprise on value adding is at the heart of any excellence program – so what is value adding and how can you tell if what you are doing adds value?

Well many people have many different definitions but we like to keep things simple.

1) Value adding steps do things that customers care about.  The acid test is ‘will they pay for this’?

2) It’s a conversion activity or process.  It takes ‘inputs’ and changes them in some way to produce an ‘output’.  This output is either already in the form that the customer wants it or it becomes the input to a downstream process that converts it some more

3) This conversion process must be optimised to produce the output right first time, every time

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