Hand-Drawn Value Stream Map

Sometimes I get ideas where I can't really let go of them, until they're realized. These ideas tend to be stupid, useless, or impractical, or any combination of the three. I probably would do better to just let these things go, but to this point I've only been able to just implement the idea and move on (case in point).

Here's another stupid idea I couldn't let go of: making computer-drawn value stream maps look hand-drawn. It was a concatenation of circumstances that made me implement this; namely, I saw a post on a Visio blog on making shapes look hand drawn.

So I wrote a VBA macro in Visio that takes an eVSM map and makes it look hand drawn. I implemented this and moved on, like I feel I should. But recently, I saw a post somewhere linking to a whiteboard font based on the t.v. show House, and decided I couldn't live without seeing how it my "hand-drawn" maps would look with a "hand-drawn" font to go with it.

Here's a regular eVSM map:

And here is one of my "incredible" hand-drawn maps, rendered like on a whiteboard (minus any smudges one might expect):

I guess my point for sharing this was just to, 1, show off a really stupid little trick I somehow couldn't live without, and 2, to say that sometimes you have to just give up and give in to that part of your brain that thinks "wouldn't it be cool if...". Who knows, it may come in handy some day (and I mean the experience of working through that problem).

Winter Sim Presentation (2010)

I saw some cool presentations at Winter Sim this year. One vendor presentation that stood out for me was from forio.com, which lets you upload simulation models and run them in the cloud. Very cool.

I also gave a presentation with Swee Leong from NIST: