Question

Design a value-stream for amazon's healthcare products to analyze and control its healthcare product?

Answer 1

The steps towards creating a Value Stream for Amazon's HealthCare products would include the following :

• Identify the product: Here we would be taking into consideration an over the counter medicine that Amazon sells online. Let this product be Neosporin. Any other healthcare item can also be considered while staying considerably within the similar product type.
• Identify the flow of the material(artifact): Now Amazon will need to identify the suppliers of the product, its own place in the distribution channel and the targeted customer base whom it needs to reach.
• Identify the information flow: Amazon will need to identify each step of the process and the opportunities it has in each step to collect and record data.It also needs to select the type of data it requires to be collected at each step.
• Estimating Lead Times for each Process: The multiple processes identified earlier will have various time required to complete. The identification of the time required will help us get the overall lead time of the end-to-end process.
• Create the current Value Stream Map.
• Identify the waste at each stage: The types of wastes include - Waiting,Transport,Excess Inventory,Faster than required process times,Defects. After identifying the types of defect that are associated with each process it, must now generate solutions towards eliminating or mitigating these wastes. By reducing the wastes we retain value in the process which was earlier leaking out.
• Create a future Value Stream Map.

A Simple Value stream Map has been added for your reference. Please refer as below:

Possible value additions to the above process is segregation on basis of supplier reliability. If the supplier has a long standing good performance record a lot of time required in the Quality Check processes can be minimized and the process can be made faster.

AMAZON OFFICE Order Data Request to Supplier Customer Feedback Supplier of the Healthcare product Customer Standard Quality Checks Final Delivery Guidelines Product Delivery to local Warehouses Standard Opeating Procedures Best practices for Inventory Management Frequency of delivery Frequency of delivery Text -TO-> Process 2: Sorting and Segregation of Prodcuts in the warehouse Process 1 : Receipt and Quality Checks 24 hrs 10 minutes 1 per hour 30 minutes Process 4: Final Delivery to Customer 24 hrs 20 minutes I per hour 30 minutes IFO-> Process 3: Order Matching and Packaging the Deliverable 36 hrs 9 minutes 2 per 24 hrs 30 minutes 48 hrs 12 minutes I per 24 hrs 30 minutes 132 hrs 41 minutes

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