Spaghetti Analysis

Spaghetti Diagrams help reveal opportunities to reduce or eliminate the time associated with certain activities such as movement of materials or information.  It's amazing the amount of excess steps it takes to accomplish a particular activity in our day to day lives at home or at work, this technique is most useful when watching people in a plant perform activities within their scope of work.  By tracing and analyzing the steps you will discover potential changes that are needed to make work easier and accomplish more in less time.

Applications:

• Administration
• Manufacturing
• Services 

Major Steps:

• Obtain or Draw a floor layout of the observation area
• Trace the movement of materials and people
• Measure the overall activities distance
• Target improvement opportunities
• Make immediate improvements with the biggest payoffs

The following examples shows the number and distance Engineering Change Orders went through during the time of observation-

Before Improvement:

After Improvement: