In Italy Serie A is referred to as ‘il campionato piu bello del mondo’, this translates as “the most beautiful championship in the world”. I lived and worked for a while and went to a few Inter games, this was the league to watch in the mid 90’s. The atmosphere was electric and the product on the pitch was a beautiful, possession orientated game with the best players in the world.

The league does not seem healthy right now. There have been chairmen and owners convicted of influencing referees, the Italian game is full of rumours claiming bribery, influenced games and clubs using politicians to get their way.

The biggest scandal resulted in Juventus having two championships stripped and dropped to Serie B. Point deductions, fines and competition bans were levelled against Fiorentina, A.C. Milan, Lazio and Reggina.

During the 06 closed season big names players moved from the affected clubs. Patrick Viera and Zlatan Ibrahimovic went to Inter, the newly crowed champions and the club that gained most from the scandal. Many other players, including Zambrotta, Cannavaro, Stam and Rui Costa left Serie A for other European leagues.

The trend continues, the leagues biggest name, Kaka signed for Real Madrid, A.C.’s manager Carlo Ancelotti moved to Chelsea and rumours abound of players following him to the Premier League.

Unquestionably Serie A was the league in which all the top players in world football wanted to play. It started with Michel Platini at Juventus, Trevor Frances at Sampdoria and Maradona leading Napoli to two titles. Lothar Matthaeus was the man who led Inter to the championship. Most memorable of all were A.C Milans trio of Frank Rijkaard, Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten that gave the storied club perhaps their most successful era ever.

After the World Cup in 1990 the success kept coming for Serie A with a new group of names making it the strongest (and wealthiest) league in the world. Ronaldo, Shevchenko, Batistuta, Crespo, Thuram and Zinedine Zidane could have played at any league in the world, and they all chose to play in Italy.

So what happened?

It seems to come down to finances. The TV contract and revenue generated by the Premier League and the privileged few in La Liga clearly allowed these clubs to compete with, and then overtake Italy financially.

To make matters worse Italian clubs generally don’t own their grounds and the last major expansion was for Italia 90. Currently the Spanish and English grounds are far ahead in both facilities and more importantly today, revenue generation. While Juve are getting a new stadium built with mostly public money, other clubs have found getting local authories to pay for upgrades in the current climate is all but impossible.

The big 5 or 6 European clubs have created incredible brands that move huge amounts of merchandise and add significantly to the bottom line, and none of those are Italian.

Additionally Italian captain Fabio Cannavaro has called for a rethinking of the Italian youth system, he proposes the clubs adopt something closer to the academies in England. The top youth players in Italy are finding homes abroad where the technical training is just as good and the facilities are far better.

The early exit from the Confederations Cup in South Africa may be exactly what the World champions needed to take a look at the fundamentals of the Italian game and look at what Serie A needs to do to allow them to compete with the big British and Spanish clubs.

A Champions League that has German and Italian sides consistently competing where it matters, along with the English and Spanish clubs can only be good for the game in Europe.

I spent some time recently reviewing the Value Stream Maps of a couple of processes and identifying the steps that the customer (the production floor) really cares about and those that don’t add value.

Here are my thoughts after identifying a number of steps that don’t add value to the customer, but are still essential part of the process.

Non-Value Added (NVA) – any activity that is not required by the business or the customer willing to pay for. The NVA list is extensive and includes storing, moving, reworking, obtaining multiple approvals or signatures for the product. As I said the list is extensive.

Value added activities can be divided up into two categories –

Customer Value Added (CVA) – this is the stuff the customer cares about, turning aluminium into airplanes, writing code and adding functions that provide additional features that the end user cares about. If the activity changes the form, fit, function, interchangeability or adds a feature then it probably adds value to the customer. Additionally any work we do that provides a competitive advantage, for example eliminating defects, reducing price or reduction in flow time, falls under this category.

Process Value Added (PVA) – activity or expense that is required to operate the business and the customer does not care about. There are a considerable number of tasks that are required (or even essential to the process not breaking down) but don’t add anything to the product.

It’s obviously important to eliminate NVA activities. There is inevitably some low hanging fruit that’s easy to remove, however it’s important to delve deeply into the process and really understand what each step in the process adds and eliminate all NVA tasks and steps.

Recognising PVA and separating them from the NVA can be difficult. You are required (by law or by some form of regulatory body) to perform there steps, but they don’t add anything to the product. First step is to confirm the step is required, then look a little close of see if it’s performed as efficiently as possible, this may require contacting a subject matter expert to really understand. Ideally you’d like to eliminate PVA, but that’s typically impossible for a true PVA step. Then you are required to ensure the cost of these steps is reduced as far as possible.