Spaghetti Mapping

Unfortunately this isn’t a recipe for Italian food.

Fortunately it’s a recipe for eliminating waste and increasing productivity!

Spaghetti mapping is so named because if you were to trace the path of an operator in a non-optimized manufacturing process or cell, you’ll find that the path looks a lot like a bowl of spaghetti. That bowl of spaghetti represents a lot of motion, or in other words - waste. Mapping it out helps you visualize the waste and can help guide you as you re-order work, pull out non-value added activities, and move tooling and inventory locations to make the operator’s path look less like a large tangled bowl of delicious pasta.

Spaghetti map “before”

Spaghetti map “after”

The best (read: only) way to do this is on the floor, watching the actual process, multiple times. Take a video if helpful so you can reference it, but always watch the actual process unfold. As you do so, draw out the path that the operator is taking, and as you keep an eye out for the 7 wastes (specifically motion and transportation), they will start to quickly become visible.