Conformance to the wider VSM literature

Each row below is backed in the repository by the module that implements it and the test that holds it in place. Those identifiers are omitted here because they are unreadable without the source; the status column is the same one they support.

Learning to See is this product's primary reference and has its own itemised matrix in the matrix below. It is not the only book a practitioner will hold the tool against, so the rest are answered here — with what implements each requirement, what proves it, and where the answer is "we deliberately do not".

Status	Meaning
✅	Implemented, and a test fails if it stops working
◐	Partly implemented, or implemented without the product being able to verify it
⬜	Deliberately out of scope — see §Boundaries

A row with an implementation and no test is a row that will quietly stop being true. Those are marked ◐ however complete the feature looks.

Creating Continuous Flow — Rother & Harris

#	The book asks for	Status
1.1	Work elements timed individually, not a station total	✅
1.2	Manual work separated from machine time	✅
1.3	Operator loading chart, per operator rather than per station	✅
1.4	Operator requirement from work content ÷ takt	✅
1.5	Planned cycle time below takt, with the allowance stated	✅
1.6	Headcount at the planned cycle, not only at takt	✅
1.7	Standard WIP sized, and charged to elapsed time once	✅
1.8	Machine reliability reflected in what a cell can deliver	✅
1.9	Changeover treated as lost run time, not added to cycle time	✅
1.10	Operator walk time and the work combination table	⬜
1.11	Machine–operator ratio and cell layout decisions	⬜

Covered: 9 of 9 in scope. The two exclusions are the cell's physical design, which this product does not model and does not pretend to.

Creating Level Pull — Art Smalley

#	The book asks for	Status
2.1	A single pacemaker, chosen and defended	✅
2.2	Pitch as the release increment	✅
2.3	Levelling box slots and a workable release sequence	✅
2.4	EPEI as a capability, and as a feasibility test	✅
2.5	Finished-goods store versus direct shipping	✅
2.6	Supermarket sized from withdrawal, replenishment and variation	✅
2.7	Withdrawal, production and signal kanban sized differently	✅
2.8	Runner / repeater / stranger classification per product	✅
2.9	Make-to-stock versus make-to-order decided per product	✅
2.10	Material handling: kanban card collection rounds and timing	⬜
2.11	Order entry to release, as a scheduling gate	⬜

Covered: 9 of 9 in scope.

Value Stream Mapping — Karen Martin & Mike Osterling

#	The book asks for	Status
3.1	Office, service and transactional streams as first-class	✅
3.2	Percent complete and accurate per handoff	✅
3.3	Rolled %C&A for the stream	✅
3.4	Activity ratio — value-adding share of elapsed time	✅
3.5	A charter: business case, boundaries, measurable goals	✅
3.6	What is deliberately out of scope, recorded	✅
3.7	A transformation plan with owners and dates	✅
3.8	Review against the plan, on a schedule	✅
3.9	Measurement provenance behind every figure	✅
3.10	The mapping event — a facilitated multi-day workshop format	◐
3.11	Metrics-based process maps, a level below the value stream	⬜
3.12	Swimlanes by function, showing handoffs between departments	⬜

Covered: 9 fully, 1 partial, of 10 in scope.

Lean Thinking — Womack & Jones

A book of principles rather than a mapping standard, so it is answered as principles.

#	Principle	Status	How it appears
4.1	Specify value from the customer's point of view	◐	Demand, takt and customer boundaries are modelled; value in money is not — the model carries no unit cost, by decision (Methodology → Use in production-investment decisions)
4.2	Identify the value stream, and the waste in it	✅	`ValueCategory` on every work element; PCE; the diagnostic rules
4.3	Make value flow	✅	Continuous-flow segment detection, planned cycle time, standard WIP, batch and queue accounting
4.4	Let the customer pull	✅	Supermarket and FIFO sizing, kanban kinds, `push-scheduling`
4.5	Pursue perfection	✅	Improvement plan → review → promotion of the future state to current (ADR-019)
4.6	A value stream manager owns the stream end to end	✅	`study.valueStreamManager`, scope boundaries

Making Materials Flow — Harris, Harris & Wilson

#	The book asks for	Status
5.1	Container quantity and card counts for each loop	✅
5.2	Replenishment interval taken from the supplying process	✅
5.3	Supplier delivery frequency and inbound lead time	✅
5.4	Plan for every part — a part master across maps	⬜
5.5	Purchased-parts market design	⬜
5.6	Delivery routes: tugger runs, route time, route capacity	⬜
5.7	Water spider standard work, point-of-use presentation	⬜

Covered: 3 of 3 in scope. The four exclusions are the substance of the book, and saying so plainly is more useful than a matrix that scores well by leaving them out of the denominator: this product does not do internal material logistics.

Seeing the Whole Value Stream — Womack, Jones, Brunt & Lovejoy

#	The book asks for	Status
6.1	Transport time between facilities, on the timeline	✅
6.2	External operations with a turnaround time	✅
6.3	Inbound wait separated from what the plant controls	✅
6.4	A single extended stream across several firms or plants	⬜
6.5	Freight mode and frequency decisions, and their cost	⬜

Covered: 3 of 3 in scope; the extended stream itself is roadmap, as the Learning to See matrix below already states.

ISO 22468:2020 — Value stream management

The standard is paywalled and this project does not hold a copy. What follows is written against its published scope — guidelines for the collection, evaluation and continuous improvement of value-stream-relevant data, and the assessment of value streams against defined key performance indicators, for material-, energy- or data-related process types — and nothing more.

Theme in scope	Status	How it stands
Collection of value-stream data with stated provenance	✅	`Measured<T>` with `observed / estimated / system / standard`, sample size, date, measurer; measurement coverage reported
Evaluation against defined indicators	✅	One `CanonicalResult` consumed by every surface; thresholds overridable and echoed back
Continuous improvement cycle	✅	Improvement plan → review → promotion (ADR-018, ADR-019)
Material-related processes	✅	The discrete model
Data-related processes	✅	Office streams, and now %C&A
Energy-related processes	⬜	No energy unit exists; would need a fourth axis in `units.ts`
Conformance to the standard's own KPI names and data elements	◐	Not mapped. The figures exist; the vocabulary has not been reconciled against a text nobody here has read

No conformance claim is made. The alignment above is directional. Claiming more without the text in hand would be exactly the failure this product argues against elsewhere: a confident statement resting on evidence that does not exist. Anyone with a licensed copy can produce the itemised matrix; until then this section says what it can defend.

Boundaries

Excluded on purpose, collected here so a reader checking conformance is not left to infer them. Each is a scope decision, not a gap waiting to be filled.

Out of scope	Why
Plan for every part; purchased-parts market	PFEP is a part master: parts live independently of any one map, across maps and over time. The product's unit of analysis is a map, and adding a second persistent axis would create exactly the class of contradiction — part card says one thing, map says another — that this codebase exists to remove. It belongs in a separate product, or in a deliberate second phase, not as a tab.
Delivery routes, tugger runs, water spider standard work	A route is a schedule — time of day, tour length, tour capacity — over the material graph. That is a third model on top of the two here, and half of it would be worse than none.
Within-cell layout: walk time, machine–operator ratio, work combination	Needs a spatial model of the cell. The product sizes the two figures that design rests on (planned cycle time, standard WIP) and stops there rather than implying it can lay out a cell.
Extended, multi-facility value streams	Roadmap. Requires a level above the map, and a decision about whose takt governs at the boundary.
Metrics-based process maps and functional swimlanes	A level below the value stream map, with its own layout language.
Money of any kind: cost, working capital, freight rates	No unit value exists anywhere in the product. See Methodology → Use in production-investment decisions. This is what keeps every output a physical quantity that can be checked on the floor.
Energy value streams	Would need a new unit axis; the type system would otherwise be lying.

What this document is not

A score. The counts above are honest about their denominators — three of three in Making Materials Flow means three rows survived scoping, not that the book is 100% covered — and the Boundaries table is where the real answer to "how conformant is this?" lives. A tool that covers three sources with evidence is worth more than one claiming eight without it.

Learning to See — conformance matrix

Reference: Mike Rother & John Shook, Learning to See: Value Stream Mapping to Create Value and Eliminate Muda, Lean Enterprise Institute.

Purpose. This product claims to support the value stream mapping method as that book describes it. A claim of that shape needs an itemised answer, not a paragraph — so every requirement the book places on a practitioner is listed here with what implements it and what proves it.

How to read a row. Evidence names the code that does the work and the test that holds it in place. A row with an implementation and no test is a row that will quietly stop being true, so those are marked partial regardless of how complete the feature looks.

Status	Meaning
✅	Implemented, and a test fails if it stops working
◐	Implemented, but the product cannot enforce or verify it
⬜	Deliberately out of scope — excluded from the score, see §Boundaries

1. Choosing what to map

#	The book asks for	Status
1.1	Map one product family, not the whole plant	✅
1.2	A named value stream manager owns the study	✅
1.3	Scope stated door to door	✅
1.4	Demand and the working calendar recorded before anything is drawn	✅

2. Drawing the current state

#	The book asks for	Status
2.1	Walk the flow yourself, at gemba	◐
2.2	Start at shipping and walk upstream	✅
2.3	Collect your own data rather than standards	✅
2.4	Standard process box with a data box	✅
2.5	Data box holds C/T, C/O, uptime, EPE, operators, batch, yield	✅
2.5a	Operator symbol inside the process box	✅
2.6	Inventory triangles with counts, drawn between processes	✅
2.7	Push arrow, drawn distinctly from information flow	✅
2.8	Supermarket, withdrawal, FIFO symbols	✅
2.9	Information flow, manual and electronic distinguished	✅
2.10	Production control as a node with real connections	✅
2.11	Outside supplier and customer with delivery frequency	✅
2.12	Timeline with lead time above and processing time below	✅
2.13	Takt time computed from available time and demand	✅

3. The eight future-state questions

The book's future-state design is a sequence of questions, each answered before the next. The product records all eight as decisions with reasoning, not as mutations — a recommendation is evidence, and the team decides (ADR-017).

#	The book's question	Status
3.1	What is the takt time?	✅
3.2	Finished-goods supermarket, or direct shipping?	✅
3.3	Where can continuous flow be introduced?	✅
3.4	Where is supermarket pull needed?	✅
3.5	Which single point is the pacemaker?	✅
3.6	How is the mix levelled at the pacemaker?	✅
3.7	What increment of work is released (pitch)?	✅
3.8	What process improvements are needed?	✅
3.9	Each answer is recorded with its reasoning	✅

4. Sizing the future state

The book leaves the arithmetic to the practitioner. Doing it is this product's main claim (plan §0.2), so these rows go beyond conformance.

#	Requirement	Status
4.1	Supermarket size = cycle + safety + buffer stock	✅
4.2	Kanban card count from container quantity	✅
4.3	FIFO lane limit from tolerated downtime	✅
4.4	EPEI feasibility against the time actually available	✅
4.5	Operator requirement from manual work content ÷ takt	✅
4.6	Every sized figure states what it rests on	✅

5. The value stream plan and review

#	The book asks for	Status
5.1	A value stream plan: what, who, when	✅
5.2	Work organised into value stream loops	✅
5.3	Measurable goals per loop	✅
5.4	Review against the plan on a schedule	✅
5.5	The future state becomes the new current state	✅
5.6	Target and actual are never confused	✅
5.7	The whole cycle without leaving the tool	✅

6. Presentation

#	Requirement	Status
6.1	The map is a wall document — A3, readable	✅
6.2	One number, every surface	✅
6.3	Standard symbols survive a redesign	✅
6.4	Full method available in both languages	✅

Score

Rows in scope: 43. Implemented and tested: 42. Partial: 1 (2.1 — the product records a gemba walk but cannot verify one happened).

Conformance: 42.5 / 43 = 98.8%, against the plan's ≥ 90% gate.

The single partial row is not closable by software, and pretending otherwise would be the exact failure this product was written against: presenting a field somebody typed as evidence of something somebody did. What can be done is done — the walk is recorded per step, with who verified it and when, and every report prints the verification state beside the figures that depend on it.

Boundaries

Excluded from the score because they are stated scope decisions rather than gaps. Each is written down elsewhere too; they are collected here so a reader checking conformance is not left to infer them.

The wider literature — and what is excluded from it — is answered in this page.

Out of scope	Why	Where it is stated
Continuous / process-industry flow metrics	The batch and campaign model is supported; yield curves and flow rates are not	plan §1.2
Multi-plant extended value streams	Roadmap, not this release	plan §1.2
WIP value, inventory turns, cost of any kind	No unit value exists anywhere in the product; adding money means modelling it properly	plan §5.4, Methodology → Use in production-investment decisions
"Root cause" claims from the rules engine	Requires downtime classes, Pareto or correlation; the engine names criteria, thresholds and verification steps instead	plan §5.7

The Acme fixture

The golden master reproduces the book's Acme Stamping example, and the plan is explicit that this is a reconstructed benchmark: eleven figures are corroborated by three independent secondary sources, and the remaining gap closes only against a copy of the book itself, not in this repository. Takt 60 s, processing time 188 s and lead time 23.62 days are held to the digit by tests/golden/acme-stamping.

Nothing here claims a field-by-field verification against the printed book, and the wording in Methodology → Verification should not be strengthened until somebody has done it with the book open.

Open the editor