Hoshin Planning

 
Hoshin Planning:
Breakthrough Improvement From Vision-Driven Leadership
The image most often depicted in U.S. literature on Hoshin Planning (also commonly known as Hoshin Kanri, and Policy Deployment) is that of a ship’s compass distributed to many ships, properly calibrated such that all ships through independent action arrive at the same destination, individually or as a group, as therequirements of the “voyage” may require.

Hoshin Planning is more than a compass for steering the direction of your business processes. It is the strategic means of control that allows your organization to make quick turns, changes, and adjustments before you become trapped in a crisis. Success in a highly competitive world requires more than focus and direction. You must have innovation. HoshinPlanning is the means for keeping the actions and innovations of your people aligned with your organization’s strategic intent.

The ideas and inspirations that guide and improve your organization come from your people. But the only way to truly leverage the creative talent of your workforce and apply those innovations to your products, your markets, your investors, and your investments, isthrough the use and application of Hoshin Planning.

How It Works…
Hoshin Planning provides an opportunity to continually improve performance by disseminating and deploying the vision, direction, targets, and plans of corporate management to top management and to all employees so that people at all job levels can continually act on the plans, and evaluate, study, and provide feedback results as apart of a continual improvement process.
The intention is that, in companies using Hoshin Planning, everybody is aware of theirs and management's Critical Success Factors (CSF’s) and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), departments do not compete against each other, projects run to successful conclusions, and business is seen as a set of coordinated processes.

At the beginning of the HoshinPlanning process, top management sets the overall vision and the annual high-level policies and targets for the company. At each level moving downward, managers and employees participate in the definition—from the overall vision and their annual targets—of the strategy and detailed action plan they will use to attain their targets. They also define the measures that will be used to demonstrate thatthey have successfully achieved their targets. Then, targets, in turn are passed on to the next level down. Each level under top management is, in turn, involved with the level above it to make sure that its proposed strategy corresponds to requirements using “Catchball” communication techniques. Regular reviews take place to identify progress and problems, and to initiate corrective action.Hoshin Planning is a management tool used to identify and close “gaps.” The difference between where you are and where you want to be can be and is thought of here, as a gap. Yet some gaps are more strategically important than others. Using these Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), is the job of management to steer the focus of their organization towards those few vital priorities that will keep orbring the organization into alignment with the demands of its markets. Once these are identified, employees can then pinpoint the group, division, factory, department, or project gaps that must be closed to stay aligned with the strategic direction of your organization.
These “vital few priorities” are actually called “Hoshins.” A key principle of Hoshin Planning is to deploy and track only a fewpriorities at each level of the organization. Given all of the rapid changes and increasing distractions organizations face today, individuals must be able to focus on those things that offer the greatest advantage to the organization. The clearer the priorities, the easier it will be for people to focus their energies on what really counts. How often has your company made dramatic improvements...