Towards Digital Solutions For Value Stream Analysis and Design: Investigating Enterprise Perspective Requirements

Value stream analysis and design is considered as a central element of lean management, globally utilized by improvement teams within industrial contexts to maximize value creation and eliminate waste. The advancement of value stream analysis and design, including material flow cost accounting, information logistics, and external factors, is shifting how improvement teams operate due to growing complexity and data volumes. Required novel workflows pull the need for digital solutions that empower improvement teams. While existing research primarily focuses on conceptualizations of solutions, there has been no derivation of real-world requirements from an enterprise perspective. To address this research gap, this paper adapts a mixed methods approach with exploratory sequential design. Initially, a qualitative interview series with nine lean management experts from different industry-related enterprises in Germany was conducted. Over 250 transcribed minutes of interviews were evaluated qualitatively and structurally. Subsequently, identified enterprise requirements were quantitatively instigated functional and dysfunctional utilizing a kano questionnaire; answered by 33 German participants with lean management background. Contributing findings of this paper are 15 enterprise requirements for digital solution development, alongside a more detailed analysis of these requirements based on their ability to systematically satisfy customer needs and mitigate dissatisfaction.