Makigami Matrix

What is Makigami?

Makigami (Japanese for "rolled paper") is a Lean tool for mapping administrative and service processes. Whereas a classic process map shows material flow, Makigami exposes who works on a case when, and how much time is lost in between steps.

Structure: rows are participating roles (people, departments, systems), columns are process steps in chronological order. Each cell marks whether a role contributes to a step. For every step you also capture: activity, processing time, waiting time, waste category, and notes.

Role (Swim Lane): An acting unit in the process: customer, back office, approver, an IT system. A role is a function, not necessarily a single person. Handovers between roles are the biggest source of waste in office processes.

Step: A self-contained activity in the process — e.g. "Capture request", "Obtain approval". A step may involve several roles at once (joint work, handover).

Processing vs. waiting time: Processing time is the time actual work happens (value-add). Waiting time is the idle time between activities — the case sits in an inbox, mail queue, or pending folder. In office processes 95 %+ waiting share is not unusual.

Muda (waste): Japanese term for any activity that consumes resources without creating customer value. The eight classic waste types ("TIMWOODS+S"): Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Overproduction, Over-processing, Defects, unused Skills.

Step-by-step workflow

Recommended sequence

• 1. Enter the process title at the top — e.g. "Internal order processing".
• 2. Add roles via "+ Role" at the bottom of the matrix. Start with the main actors; more emerge naturally during the discussion.
• 3. Add steps chronologically via "+ Step" on the right. Anything that triggers a status change is its own step — pure waiting/idle steps are allowed.
• 4. Set participation in the matrix: click the dot in a cell when the role contributes to that step. Multiple marks are allowed (handover, joint work).
• 5. Fill each step card: activity text, processing time, waiting time, one or more Muda categories, and notes on handovers or bottlenecks.
• 6. Check the KPI strip: Lead Time and PCE show the leverage — small PCE means lots of improvement potential.
• 7. Export the workshop result: XLSX for sharing, JSON to reload later, PNG/SVG for presentations.

Workshop tips

• Build it together with people doing the work — outsiders typically miss shadow steps and informal handovers.
• Capture realistic, not target times. Honest estimates beat polished fiction.
• Estimate waiting times roughly first, then calibrate with sample cases.
• Use drag & drop to reorder roles/steps when the workshop reveals a new sequence.

Interpreting the metrics

KPI strip

Σ Processing: Sum of all processing times — the actually value-adding time in the process. Usually minutes to a few hours.

Σ Waiting: Sum of all waiting times — idle periods between activities. In office processes this is typically the dominant share of Lead Time.

Lead Time: Σ Processing + Σ Waiting. The end-to-end duration from process trigger to result. From the customer's perspective, the only relevant measure.

PCE (Process Cycle Efficiency): Σ Processing / Lead Time, in percent. The fraction of Lead Time that is value-adding. A PCE of 5 % means: for every minute of value, 19 minutes are wasted.

Rules of thumb

• PCE > 25 %: excellent for office processes.
• PCE 5–25 %: typical industry/service value with clear optimization potential.
• PCE < 5 %: massive leverage — waiting times dominate.
• Improvement always starts at the largest waiting block, not at the fastest processing time.

Muda distribution

Which Muda categories appear most often? Frequent "Waiting" marks point to capacity issues or unclear ownership. "Over-processing" hints at fuzzy quality requirements, "Defects" at problems in upstream steps.

Fields and inputs

Matrix

• Column header: editable step title. The Sx index is fixed, the title optional.
• Row header: editable role label.
• Cell: clicking the dot toggles participation on/off. Active dots are filled.
• Grip icon (⋮⋮): drag anchor for reordering steps or roles. Appears on header hover.
• X icon: delete column/row — with confirmation prompt.

Per-step card

• Activity: what concretely happens? Two sentences are perfectly fine.
• Participating roles: same content as the matrix dots — chips toggle the same way.
• Processing / waiting time: free-text input (see below). Canonicalized on Tab/blur.
• Waste (Muda): multiple categories per step allowed. Colors and labels are customizable in settings.
• Notes: anything that does not fit other fields — handover paths, bottlenecks, system breaks.

Time free-text

Times are captured as free text and internally converted to seconds. Several units can be combined, comma or dot work as decimal separator.

• "45min" → 45 minutes
• "4h 30min" → 4 hours 30 minutes
• "1d 5h" → 1 workday (8 h) + 5 hours
• "1.5h" → 1 hour 30 minutes
• Empty = 0; invalid input is flagged red and counted as 0 in the KPI.

Defaults are s, min, h, d (= 28800 s, i.e. 8-hour workday). Custom units can be added in settings — e.g. "wk" = 144000 s for a workweek.

Tips & pitfalls

Good practice

• Err on the fine side: steps with more than an hour of processing time can usually be meaningfully split.
• Make handovers visible: when two roles share the same step, note the medium (email, inbox, system).
• Measure waiting honestly: prefer to write "1d" than to hide the inconvenient truth — that is the actual point of the method.
• Multiple Muda categories per step are allowed — for genuinely mixed issues, mark them all.

Typical mistakes

• Capturing the target process instead of the actual one: Makigami shows reality, not the ideal.
• Only recording processing time, skipping waiting: this removes the method's most important lever.
• Too few roles: when "Back office" lumps several people together, internal handovers vanish.
• Forgetting status/idle steps: "Waiting for approval" is its own step — even when nobody is actively working.
• PCE as the sole target metric: a higher PCE without lower absolute Lead Time does not help the customer.

When NOT to use?

• Pure production processes with material and machine flow — a Value Stream Map is more precise.
• Very short processes (< 5 steps): SIPOC or a simple process map is usually enough.
• When neither measured nor estimable time data is available — the method lives on time values.

Examples

This module ships with the following example datasets — load any of them in the app with a single click.

Available in the following cycles

• DMAIC: Analyze
• DMADV: Analyze
• 8D: D4 — Root Cause Analysis