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I hate to belabor this point, but any CFD with a projection on it is not a CFD. It is a Burn Up chart or Projection Chart or something else, but it is most definitely not a CFD. To review, there are two reasons why a projections on CFDs are incorrect. The first reason is because to do a projection the chart must have some type of backlog displayed. But CFDs should not have backlogs on them. That is mistake number one. The second reason is that CFDs are for looking backward, they are not for making projections about the future. That is mistake number two. The fact that it is not a CFD is not a bad thing because this projection view can potentially be very useful (used incorrectly it can also be very bad). I should point out here that because I cannot call them CFDs, the term I am going to use for these types of charts is going to be either Burn Up Charts or Projection Charts.

Flat Lines Another pattern that I look for on a CFD is whenever any lines that flatten out over long periods of time (remember that lines can never go down!). Figure 6.2 shows an example of this: Figure 6.2: Flat Throughput Sections on a CFD Depending on your perspective, these lines could represent either periods of zero arrivals or periods of zero departures. Usually you will be concerned about these flat lines as periods of zero departures. The reason why is because zero departures means nothing is getting done. In other words, no value is being delivered to the customer (or to a downstream step).

Stair Steps A batch transfer in your process will manifest itself as "stair steps" on your CFD.

Mismatched Arrivals and Departures Let's say we had a CFD that looked like: Figure 6.1: Mismatched Arrivals and Departures In this picture the slope of the top-most line is steeper than the slope of the bottom-most line. This is a classic pattern that develops whenever items arrive to our process faster than they depart.

Key Learnings and Takeaways On your CFD, does arrival rate match departure rate? Are there any bulges in the workflow step bands? Do any bands disappear? Are there any long periods of flat lines? Are there stair steps? Is there an S-curve? Think about improvements to consider if everything looks good on your CFD.