The Power of a Spaghetti Diagram: A Simple Tool for Big Impact on Your Production Line

What’s one simple action you can take today to make a significant impact on your production line with minimal effort? Enter the Spaghetti Diagram — a straightforward yet powerful lean tool.

When tasked with redesigning a process, I started with a clean sheet of paper. It felt like a world of possibilities, but first, I needed to understand the process as it existed. This is where mapping the value stream became invaluable.

What is a Spaghetti Diagram?

Despite its quirky name, the Spaghetti Diagram is a lean method use to visually map the flow of materials (or operators) through a process. By tracing their actual movement, you can uncover inefficiencies in distance and time—waste that might not otherwise be obvious.

Here’s how you can create one quickly:

What you’ll see is a map of movement—often tangled and inefficient, like a plate of spaghetti.

This powerful and extremely quick method, I’ve used to quickly show and demonstrate to workers just how much waste/effort they are using and what it can be.

Once you’ve worked out the distances and time taken, they become the benchmark for comparison against any new layouts you review, when you consider layouts think about the actual order of the build and rearrange the stages to facilitate this flow first. Make sure they can fit in the area you have, then work out the new distances and times, you’ll be surprised how much you’ve saved.

To go one set further, consider stock locations to the stages where they are needed, if you don’t have line-side stock then account for this in your diagram and calculate this as well.

Taking It Further with CAD

For more precise planning, digitise your diagram (this makes creating new layouts quick and simple without the need to redraw them, and in CAD it’s a breeze to measure distances):

Why It Works

This method is fast, inexpensive, and highly visual—making it easy to highlight waste and spark discussions about improvement. Even with fixed equipment or monolithic setups, you can often find gains through smarter layouts or workflow adjustments.

In my own experience, applying this tool immediately showcased how much effort and time could be saved. It’s a perfect example of lean thinking in action: small steps with measurable results.

Have you tried using a Spaghetti Diagram? Share your experiences or tips below!

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