Process Mapping and Value Stream Management

Introduction

Organizations improve what they can see, describe, and measure. Process mapping converts work that is often distributed across departments, information systems, suppliers, and customers into a visual representation. Value stream management extends this view by linking process activities to customer value, time, inventory, information, capacity, and improvement priorities.

In Lean Manufacturing and Service Blueprinting, process mapping is not merely a drawing exercise. It is a method of inquiry. A map should reveal where work waits, where information is distorted, where ownership changes, where defects are detected late, and where resources are constrained. It should also distinguish value-adding work from necessary but non-value-adding work and from avoidable waste.

This chapter develops four complementary tools:

• SIPOC diagrams for defining process boundaries and stakeholders;
• detailed process maps for understanding sequence, decisions, controls, and responsibility;
• spaghetti diagrams for analysing physical movement and layout-related waste; and
• current-state value stream maps for integrating material and information flows across organizational boundaries.

The chapter then explains how to measure flow, identify constraints, design a prioritized future state, and govern implementation.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, the reader should be able to:

1. Establish an appropriate process boundary using a SIPOC diagram.
2. Construct and interpret cross-functional process maps and service blueprints.
3. Use spaghetti diagrams to quantify unnecessary movement.
4. Develop a current-state value stream map showing material, information, inventory, and time.
5. Calculate and interpret lead time, process time, takt time, first-pass yield, and related measures.
6. Identify bottlenecks, failure points, information delays, and cross-functional dependencies.
7. Design and prioritize a future-state value stream using Lean principles.
8. Evaluate the limitations, governance requirements, and ethical implications of process mapping.

1. Process Thinking and the Boundaries of Improvement

A process is a linked set of activities that transforms inputs into outputs for a customer or stakeholder. The customer may be external, such as a purchaser receiving a product, or internal, such as a planning department receiving a reliable production schedule. A process has a purpose, a trigger, inputs, outputs, resources, controls, and performance criteria.

A process should not be confused with an organizational function. Purchasing, production, logistics, sales, and information technology are functions; order fulfilment, new-product introduction, and complaint resolution are processes that cross those functions. Lean improvement generally creates greater value when it follows the flow of the product or service rather than the formal organization chart.

Value and waste

Value-adding work changes a product or service in a way the customer is willing to pay for, performs the work correctly the first time, and is necessary to deliver the outcome. For example, machining a required feature may add value. Moving a component between buildings normally does not.

Necessary but non-value-adding activities may be required by law, safety, accounting, or current technology. Examples include regulatory inspection, identity verification, and mandatory record retention. They should be controlled and minimized, but cannot automatically be eliminated.

Pure waste includes defects, overproduction, waiting, unused talent, transportation, inventory, motion, and overprocessing. In services, waste also appears as repeated data entry, customer handoffs, unclear status information, and avoidable customer effort.

A sound map records facts rather than blame. A long queue may result from a policy, demand variability, batch scheduling, or a capacity constraint rather than from poor individual performance.

2. SIPOC: Defining the Process at the Right Level

SIPOC stands for Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers. It is a high-level scoping tool, usually prepared before detailed mapping. A SIPOC prevents teams from beginning with an excessively narrow local process and missing upstream causes or downstream consequences.

A SIPOC is most useful when the team agrees on the start and end points, uses customer language for outputs, and identifies critical-to-quality requirements. It should not attempt to show every decision, transaction, or operator action.

Constructing a SIPOC

A practical sequence is:

1. State the process purpose and define the start and end events.
2. List major process stages, preferably using verbs.
3. Identify outputs and the customers who use them.
4. Determine the inputs needed for each output.
5. Identify suppliers of those inputs.
6. Validate the diagram with process owners, frontline personnel, suppliers, and customers where appropriate.
7. Record assumptions, exclusions, and unresolved boundary questions.

The process boundary is a managerial decision. If the objective is to reduce customer complaint resolution time, the boundary may begin with complaint receipt and end with confirmed closure. If the objective is to reduce delivery failures, the boundary may need to include order entry, planning, picking, transport, and customer receipt.

3. Detailed Process Maps and Service Blueprints

A detailed process map shows the sequence of activities, decisions, rework loops, information exchanges, controls, and ownership. Common symbols include rectangles for activities, diamonds for decisions, arrows for flow, and document or data symbols for information. Organizations should define a local notation standard; visual elegance is less important than consistent interpretation.

A cross-functional map, sometimes called a swimlane map, places activities in lanes representing departments, roles, systems, or organizations. It exposes handoffs and clarifies who receives an output from whom. Excessive handoffs are not automatically wasteful, but each handoff creates an opportunity for delay, misunderstanding, queue formation, or loss of accountability.

Service blueprinting adds a customer perspective. It commonly distinguishes:

• customer actions;
• frontstage employee actions visible to the customer;
• backstage employee actions not visible to the customer;
• support processes and technologies; and
• lines of interaction, visibility, and internal interaction.

This makes it possible to relate internal process performance to customer experience. For example, a customer may see only a confirmation message, while backstage work includes credit checks, inventory allocation, fraud screening, and exception handling. A fast frontstage interaction may conceal substantial internal delay.

Map the actual process

A current-state map should be based on observation, transaction records, interviews, system logs, and direct sampling. The documented procedure is useful, but it is not necessarily the process that customers experience. Teams should record exceptions, rework, informal workarounds, batch behaviour, and waiting caused by approvals.

A useful mapping discipline is to ask, for every step:

• What triggers this activity?
• What input is required?
• Who performs it and with what standard?
• What is the output and who receives it?
• How long does the work take?
• How long does it wait before the next step?
• How often is it repeated, corrected, or rejected?
• What information system or control is involved?

4. Spaghetti Diagrams and Physical Flow

A spaghetti diagram traces the actual path of a person, material, document, patient, tool, or vehicle over a layout. The resulting line often resembles tangled spaghetti, revealing excessive travel, backtracking, crossing routes, and poor point-of-use organization.

To construct one, obtain a reasonably accurate layout, select a representative observation period, trace movement in sequence, and measure distance or count trips. Different products, shifts, or service cases may require separate diagrams. A single exceptional case should not be presented as typical without qualification.

Important measures include total distance travelled, number of trips, number of crossings, travel between process stages, and time spent in movement. If route segments have lengths d₁, d₂, …, dₙ, total travel distance is:

where D_total and each dᵢ are measured in the same unit, such as metres. If the observation represents multiple cases, average distance per case is:

where N is the number of observed cases. This calculation assumes that the cases are comparable and that the selected period is representative.

A spaghetti diagram does not by itself prove that a layout change is justified. Travel may be necessary for safety, segregation, inspection, security, or access to shared equipment. The diagram should therefore be combined with demand, risk, ergonomic, and capacity evidence.

5. Current-State Value Stream Mapping

Value stream mapping (VSM) represents the end-to-end flow required to deliver a product or service, including both material and information. It commonly includes customer demand, supplier interaction, production or service stages, inventory or queues, shipment or completion, information flows, process data boxes, and a timeline.

A current-state VSM should answer five questions:

1. What does the customer require, and at what rate?
2. How does the demand signal travel upstream?
3. How does the product, case, or service request move downstream?
4. Where does it wait, accumulate, or require rework?
5. Where is the largest opportunity for flow improvement?

Essential data

Depending on the setting, collect:

• customer demand and working time;
• product or service family;
• cycle time and changeover time;
• uptime or availability;
• staffing and available capacity;
• queue or inventory quantity;
• batch size and dispatch frequency;
• defect, rework, and first-pass yield;
• information transmission method and frequency; and
• supplier and customer lead times.

Data boxes should distinguish observed values from estimates. A map that gives false precision can be more misleading than a map that openly identifies uncertainty.

Time-line measures

Process lead time is the elapsed time from the defined start to the defined completion of a case or unit. If waiting intervals are w₁ through wₖ and processing intervals are p₁ through pₘ, a simplified lead-time model is:

where all intervals use the same unit, such as minutes, hours, or days. The formula applies when the mapped stages are sequential and the intervals are measured on a consistent basis. Parallel processing, batching, and rework require careful definition and may require a more detailed model.

Total processing time is:

A simple process-cycle-efficiency indicator is:

PCE is descriptive, not a universal measure of customer value. Processing time may include necessary non-value-adding work, and a high PCE does not guarantee quality, safety, flexibility, or customer satisfaction.

For a stable, repetitive system, Little’s Law relates work-in-process, throughput, and flow time:

where WIP is average work-in-process, TH is average throughput per unit of time, and CT is average flow time in the same time unit. The relationship assumes a stable system over the period considered: average entry and exit rates are approximately equal and the measured population is defined consistently. It is not a license to infer causality; reducing WIP may reduce flow time, but only if the underlying process and demand conditions permit it.

Takt time and capacity

Takt time expresses the pace required to meet customer demand:

where T_available is net available production or service time in a period and D is required customer demand in that same period. Planned breaks, meetings, and scheduled non-working time should be excluded from T_available; the assumptions must be stated.

For example, a cell has 420 net working minutes per day and demand is 140 units per day. Therefore:

If a process step requires 4 minutes per unit, one resource cannot meet the required pace without overtime, parallel capacity, work-content reduction, or demand modification. Takt is a demand rate, not the actual cycle time and not a target for unsafe rushing.

The theoretical minimum number of equally loaded operators or stations is:

where W is total work content per unit, takt is in time per unit, and ceil means round upward to the next whole resource. This is a lower bound. It ignores precedence constraints, variability, skills, changeovers, downtime, and balancing losses.

First-pass yield for sequential stages can be calculated, under the assumption that stage yields are independent and consistently defined, as:

where FPYᵢ is the proportion passing stage i without rework. If three stages have first-pass yields of 0.98, 0.95, and 0.97, then:

Thus approximately 90.3% pass all three stages without rework. Correlated failures, selective routing, and inconsistent denominators invalidate the simple multiplication and require a flow or probability model suited to the process.

6. Diagnosing Constraints and Flow Losses

A constraint is a factor that limits the rate at which the system achieves its purpose. It may be a machine, specialist, approval authority, policy, supplier, information system, market condition, or physical space. The slowest apparent activity is not always the system constraint: a downstream process may have spare capacity but be starved by unreliable upstream supply.

Constraint analysis should distinguish:

• capacity constraints: insufficient available capability;
• variability constraints: unstable demand, processing time, quality, or supply;
• policy constraints: batch rules, approval limits, incentives, or scheduling conventions;
• information constraints: delayed, incomplete, or conflicting signals; and
• quality constraints: defects that consume capacity and disrupt flow.

A practical improvement sequence is to identify the constraint, exploit existing capacity, subordinate other activities to its requirements, elevate capacity if necessary, and then reassess because the constraint may move. This logic discourages local optimization, such as maximizing output at every department while increasing total inventory and lead time.

Queue formation is affected by utilization and variability. As utilization approaches 100%, even modest variation can produce sharply increasing waiting. Consequently, a manager should not plan every resource at theoretical full utilization when responsiveness is important. The appropriate capacity buffer depends on demand variability, service-level commitments, cost, and risk.

7. Designing the Future-State Value Stream

A future-state map is a proposed operating model, not an idealized picture with all problems erased. It should show how demand will be translated into work, how flow will be controlled, how exceptions will be managed, and how performance will be learned.

Common design principles include:

Establish customer-oriented flow

Create a product or service family with sufficiently similar routing and demand characteristics. Avoid combining fundamentally different flows in one map merely for convenience.

Reduce batch size and enable flow

Smaller batches generally reduce waiting and expose quality problems sooner, but may increase changeovers or transaction cost. The correct decision compares total system effects rather than optimizing one local measure.

Use pull where conditions support it

A pull system authorizes upstream work in response to downstream consumption. Kanban, electronic signals, and replenishment rules can regulate work-in-process. Pull is not simply a card or software feature; it requires defined limits, replenishment discipline, quality at the source, and response to abnormal conditions.

Create a pacemaker process

A pacemaker is the process scheduled in relation to customer demand and used to establish the rhythm of the value stream. It should be selected with attention to process stability, product mix, and the location of inventory or decoupling points.

Protect quality at the source

Include standard work, mistake-proofing, clear acceptance criteria, rapid abnormality escalation, and feedback to the point where the defect was created. Inspection alone does not create quality and may shift defects downstream.

Integrate information flow

Specify who releases work, when forecasts become orders, how changes are authorized, and which system is the source of truth. A future state with physical flow improvements but fragmented information may merely move the queue.

Manage across organizational boundaries

Supplier agreements, shared service-level definitions, synchronized data, common process ownership, and joint problem-solving are often required. Local improvement targets can conflict with end-to-end flow; governance must therefore include representatives of the whole value stream.

8. Prioritizing Improvements

A future-state design produces more ideas than can be implemented simultaneously. Prioritization should combine customer impact, system constraint relief, risk reduction, feasibility, and learning value.

A simple weighted scoring model can be used as a transparent decision aid:

where Scoreⱼ is the score for initiative j, wᵢ is the weight assigned to criterion i, and rᵢⱼ is the rating of initiative j on criterion i. Weights should be normalized or otherwise defined consistently, and rating scales must be documented. The score supports judgement; it does not replace economic analysis, safety review, or stakeholder consultation.

Typical criteria include customer lead-time reduction, constraint relief, quality improvement, regulatory or safety risk, implementation effort, cost, cross-functional dependence, and reversibility. High-priority actions often include stabilizing demand signals, reducing a major queue, correcting a quality-at-source failure, or standardizing a critical handoff before purchasing new technology.

A useful implementation plan identifies owner, target condition, baseline, measure, due date, dependencies, experiment or pilot, and escalation route. Future-state maps should be reviewed after implementation because actual behaviour may differ from the design.

9. Illustrative Case: Regional Medical-Device Repair Flow

Background

The following is a fictional illustrative case. A regional service centre repairs infusion pumps for hospitals. Hospital engineers submit requests through email. The centre receives approximately 48 repair requests per week, but completed repairs are highly variable. Hospitals complain about long and unpredictable turnaround times.

Problem and current-state analysis

A cross-functional team creates a SIPOC. The process begins when a valid repair request is received and ends when the tested pump is returned and the service record is closed. The team then observes 20 cases, reviews system records, and maps the flow.

The current state contains these features:

• requests arrive through three channels;
• incomplete fault information causes clarification emails;
• triage waits for a weekly specialist meeting;
• pumps queue for diagnosis;
• parts are ordered in monthly batches;
• repair technicians discover documentation problems during testing; and
• dispatch information is entered manually in two systems.

The team measures average waiting time of 7.5 working days and average hands-on work of 2.0 hours per case. Converting hands-on work to working days is not necessary when reporting both measures separately; if one working day is defined as 8 hours, the processing time is 0.25 working days. A simplified process-cycle-efficiency estimate is therefore:

This does not mean that 96.8% of the elapsed time is removable waste. Some time supports safety checks, parts availability, transport, or regulatory records. It does indicate that waiting dominates the observed turnaround time.

The team also finds that diagnosis and final test are performed in one specialist area. Diagnosis has an average work content of 30 minutes per case, but the specialist is available only during limited periods. The apparent constraint is therefore a combination of specialist availability and weekly scheduling policy, not simply technician speed.

Approach and future state

The team proposes one standard electronic intake form with mandatory serial-number and fault fields, daily triage, a visual queue limited to 12 cases, and a replenishment rule for frequently used parts. The specialist becomes the pacemaker for diagnosis, with a daily schedule based on actual hospital demand. Quality and regulatory checks remain mandatory but are moved earlier where possible and linked to standard work.

A service blueprint clarifies that hospitals should receive an automatic acknowledgement, a committed status date, and an exception notification when a part or safety issue changes the plan. Backstage staff retain responsibility for technical review, while the customer-visible communication is standardized.

The future-state plan prioritizes intake standardization and triage because they reduce information delay and improve use of the specialist constraint. Parts-batch reduction follows, subject to inventory and expiry controls. System integration is treated as a later improvement because it requires more investment, although duplicate entry is measured immediately.

Outcome and learning points

In a pilot, average waiting falls to 4.0 working days, hands-on work remains approximately 2.0 hours, and incomplete requests fall substantially. The pilot does not claim universal success: it covers one hospital group and excludes emergency repairs. The centre therefore establishes a control plan with weekly measures for request completeness, queue size, diagnosis response time, first-pass test yield, and total turnaround.

The case illustrates five lessons. First, the value stream crossed customer, service, parts, and information boundaries. Second, the major opportunity was waiting and information quality rather than faster repair motions. Third, safety and regulatory activities were not labelled waste automatically. Fourth, the future state combined process, policy, and technology changes. Fifth, measurement boundaries and pilot scope were explicitly reported.

10. Challenges, Governance, and Contemporary Practice

Data quality and representativeness

A process map can encode inaccurate assumptions. Sampling should cover normal and abnormal demand, different shifts, product families, and relevant customer segments. Timestamp definitions must be consistent: request receipt, work start, completion, dispatch, and customer receipt are different events.

Privacy and ethical use

Service and healthcare maps may contain personal, confidential, or commercially sensitive information. Teams should minimize personally identifiable data, restrict access, follow retention requirements, and use aggregated or anonymized records where possible. Maps must not be used to unfairly rank individuals when system conditions, staffing, or policy create the observed delay.

Automation and AI

Process-mining software can reconstruct flows from event logs, identify variants, and compare actual paths with intended procedures. Artificial intelligence can help classify cases, detect unusual sequences, summarize interview data, or predict likely delays. However, automated analysis inherits the quality and bias of the underlying data. Governance should require traceability, human validation, access control, model-performance monitoring, and an explanation of how recommendations affect employees or customers.

Sustainability and resilience

Future-state design should include energy, material loss, packaging, transport emissions, worker ergonomics, and resilience to supplier disruption. A smaller local inventory may reduce working capital but increase vulnerability if supply is unreliable. Lean does not mean indiscriminate inventory elimination; it means understanding the purpose, risk, and control of buffers.

Common failure modes

Frequent failures include mapping the ideal procedure instead of actual work, starting with a department rather than a customer value stream, collecting excessive detail before clarifying purpose, measuring activity instead of flow, treating every queue as identical, and implementing tools without changing policies or management behaviour. Another failure is producing a future-state map without an accountable implementation plan.

Best-Practice Checklist

Before approving a process map or future-state plan, ask:

• Is the customer, purpose, start point, and end point explicit?
• Were frontline observations and reliable data used?
• Are material, information, decision, and responsibility flows visible?
• Are waiting, rework, defects, batch sizes, and exceptions quantified?
• Are value-adding, necessary non-value-adding, and avoidable activities distinguished?
• Is the system constraint supported rather than locally overloaded?
• Are safety, regulatory, privacy, and equity requirements protected?
• Does the future state identify owners, measures, assumptions, and dependencies?
• Is there a review cycle to compare designed and actual performance?

Chapter Summary

Process mapping makes work visible across organizational and technological boundaries. SIPOC establishes scope and stakeholders; detailed cross-functional maps expose sequence, handoffs, decisions, and ownership; service blueprints connect backstage operations to customer experience; and spaghetti diagrams reveal physical movement and layout waste. Value stream mapping integrates material, information, inventory, queues, process data, and customer demand in an end-to-end view.

Quantitative measures strengthen interpretation when their boundaries and assumptions are explicit. Lead time combines waiting and processing; process-cycle efficiency describes the proportion of elapsed time represented by processing; Little’s Law relates work-in-process, throughput, and flow time in a stable system; takt time expresses the pace required by demand; and first-pass yield shows the proportion that completes without rework. These measures are diagnostic rather than complete definitions of performance.

Future-state design should address flow, pull, batch size, quality at the source, information governance, capacity, and cross-functional accountability. Constraints may be physical, informational, policy-based, quality-related, or variability-driven. Improvement priorities should be transparent and should consider customer value, constraint relief, risk, feasibility, and learning. Effective value stream management combines visual analysis with sound measurement, ethical governance, experimentation, and sustained managerial ownership.

Key Terms

SIPOC: A high-level view of Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers.

Process boundary: The defined start and end points of the process being studied.

Value-adding activity: Work that changes the offering in a way the customer values and that is done correctly.

Necessary non-value-adding activity: Work required by law, safety, control, or current conditions but not directly valued by the customer.

Waste: Resource consumption that does not create value, including avoidable delay, defects, excess movement, and overproduction.

Swimlane map: A process map that assigns activities to roles, functions, systems, or organizations.

Service blueprint: A service map linking customer actions, visible employee actions, backstage work, and support processes.

Spaghetti diagram: A traced representation of physical movement over a layout.

Value stream: The connected activities and flows required to deliver value to a customer.

Value stream mapping: A visual method for analysing end-to-end material and information flow.

Lead time: Elapsed time from a defined process start to a defined completion.

Process time: Time spent actively performing specified work.

Process-cycle efficiency: Processing time divided by total lead time, expressed as a percentage.

Takt time: Net available time divided by required customer demand.

Work-in-process: Items, cases, or requests that have entered but not completed a process.

Constraint: A factor that limits the rate or performance of the whole system.

Pacemaker process: The process scheduled in relation to customer demand and used to establish flow rhythm.

Pull system: A system in which upstream work is authorized by downstream consumption or demand.

First-pass yield: The proportion completing a stage or sequence without rework.

Process mining: Analysis of event-log data to reconstruct and evaluate actual process execution.

Review Questions

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the principal purpose of a SIPOC diagram?
2. Distinguish value-adding work from necessary non-value-adding work.
3. What type of waste is primarily revealed by a spaghetti diagram?
4. Define takt time and identify the two quantities used to calculate it.
5. State one assumption required when applying Little’s Law.

Long Answer Questions

1. Explain how a cross-functional process map and a service blueprint provide different but complementary perspectives.
2. Describe a rigorous method for constructing a current-state value stream map.
3. Discuss how constraints, variability, and batch policies interact to affect lead time.
4. Explain the principles that should guide future-state value stream design.
5. Evaluate the ethical, privacy, and governance issues associated with process mining and AI-supported process analysis.

Analytical / Application Questions

1. A process has 480 net available minutes per day and customer demand of 160 units per day. Calculate takt time and explain what it implies if one operation requires 4 minutes per unit.
2. Three sequential stages have first-pass yields of 0.96, 0.98, and 0.95. Calculate the overall first-pass yield and explain one limitation of multiplying the stage yields.
3. A service process has 6 days of waiting and 0.5 days of processing. Calculate process-cycle efficiency and propose two investigations before concluding that all remaining time is waste.

Multiple Choice Questions with Answers

Question 1

Which tool is primarily used to define process boundaries and identify suppliers, inputs, outputs, and customers?

A. SIPOC diagram

B. Spaghetti diagram

C. Control chart

D. Pareto histogram

Correct Answer: A. SIPOC diagram

Question 2

A department has 420 net available minutes per day and demand of 140 units per day. What is the takt time?

A. 2 minutes per unit

B. 3 minutes per unit

C. 4 minutes per unit

D. 5 minutes per unit

Correct Answer: B. 3 minutes per unit

Question 3

Which feature most directly distinguishes a service blueprint from a conventional process map?

A. It excludes customer activities

B. It focuses only on physical movement

C. It separates customer, frontstage, backstage, and support activities

D. It measures only machine cycle time

Correct Answer: C. It separates customer, frontstage, backstage, and support activities

Question 4

If average throughput is 10 cases per hour and average flow time is 3 hours, what is the average work-in-process under Little’s Law?

A. 3 cases

B. 10 cases

C. 13 cases

D. 30 cases

Correct Answer: D. 30 cases

Question 5

What does a spaghetti diagram primarily reveal?

A. Statistical process capability

B. Physical movement and travel patterns

C. Supplier payment terms

D. Customer willingness to pay

Correct Answer: B. Physical movement and travel patterns

Question 6

A process has 1.5 hours of processing time and 10 hours of lead time. What is its process-cycle efficiency?

A. 6.7%

B. 15%

C. 66.7%

D. 85%

Correct Answer: B. 15%

Question 7

Which statement about a constraint is most accurate?

A. It is always the slowest machine

B. It can be physical, policy-based, informational, or quality-related

C. It disappears when every department maximizes utilization

D. It is identical to any process variation

Correct Answer: B. It can be physical, policy-based, informational, or quality-related

Question 8

Three sequential stages have first-pass yields of 0.98, 0.95, and 0.97. What is the approximate combined first-pass yield, assuming consistent independent definitions?

A. 90.3%

B. 92.0%

C. 95.0%

D. 97.0%

Correct Answer: A. 90.3%

Question 9

Which is an appropriate characteristic of a current-state value stream map?

A. It shows only the ideal future process

B. It excludes information flow

C. It records actual flow, queues, data, and customer demand

D. It is limited to one department

Correct Answer: C. It records actual flow, queues, data, and customer demand

Question 10

Why should future-state improvements be prioritized rather than implemented indiscriminately?

A. Because all Lean tools are incompatible

B. Because resources, risks, dependencies, and system effects must be considered

C. Because customer demand is irrelevant to sequencing

D. Because measurement is unnecessary after mapping

Correct Answer: B. Because resources, risks, dependencies, and system effects must be considered