Value Chain Analysis

Used in STEP 4 STEP 5 STEP 6

A glimpse inside

Preview of the D3 worked example — structure and colouring shown, detail deliberately softened

3 tabs: Cover · blank tool · Meridian worked example. Eight columns per value-chain stage, from the value created to the waste, waiting, hand-offs and risk that sit around it, ending in the improvement opportunity.

In a sentence — trace value from first demand to customer outcome, stage by stage, so waste and risk hiding inside a single team's process become visible across the whole chain.

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What this tool does

A process map drawn one team at a time almost always misses the hand-off where the real damage happens. This tool starts from the customer's demand and follows it all the way through, so delay, waste and risk that live between teams — not just inside them — get written down somewhere. It's the cross-functional, end-to-end view — broader than D1's detailed map of a single service; use D1 for exactly how one stage works, D3 for where it sits in the whole chain.

There's no scoring or status tracking here by design — this sheet is for building a shared, accurate picture, not for chasing one. The Constraint Analysis and prioritisation instruments do the deciding; this one does the seeing.

WHY THIS HELPS

‘Waste / rework’ has a specific meaning here: work that adds nothing the customer would recognise as value — duplicated effort, correcting an avoidable error, waiting that was designed in rather than genuinely necessary. Naming it is what makes it possible to remove in TO-BE design, rather than leaving it invisible inside an activity that looks perfectly normal on paper.

HOW THIS FEEDS D1 AND D2

This sheet and D1 answer different questions at different altitudes. D1 asks ‘exactly how does this one stage work, minute by minute’ — useful once you already know which stage matters. D3 asks ‘where in the whole chain, from first demand to customer outcome, does the damage actually sit’ — useful before you know that yet. Walk D3 first if you're not sure which stage deserves D1's level of detail; the Waiting/delay, Waste/rework and Risk introduced columns, read across all the rows together, are usually where a constraint candidate for D2 first becomes visible — a stage where several of those columns are non-trivial at once is a stronger candidate than one where a single column looks bad in isolation.

What's included

D3 · Value Chain Analysis — the blank tool

Ready to complete for your own engagement. Blue-tinted cells are for you to fill in.

Worked example

The same tool completed end to end, using the fictional Meridian Wealth Management scenario — see what ‘done’ looks like before you start your own.

How it's used

A quick walkthrough of the sheet:

Using this tool

1Lay out one row per stage, in order, from where demand first enters to the customer outcome.

2For each stage, state the value created for the customer before you describe the activity itself.

3Capture any waiting or delay, and every hand-off to another team or system.

4Note waste or rework at that stage, and any risk it introduces.

5Use the Improvement opportunity column to flag where TO-BE design should focus first.

Matches the sheet's own columns exactly: Value chain stage, Value created, Activities, Waiting / delay, Hand-offs, Waste / rework, Risk introduced, Improvement opportunity.