Hoshin Kanri - Overview

Hoshin Kanri is a proven technique that helps organizations focus effort on the critical few initiatives and achieve results. TQE provides software, training, and handbooks to facilitate your Hoshin implementation.

Hoshin Kanri is a planning process that was developed in Japan but it is based on the US techniques of Management by Objectives and the classical Plan-Do-Check-Act improvement cycle. Hoshin Kanri is used to communicate company policy to everyone in the organization. Its primary benefit is to focus activity on the key things necessary for success. Japanese Deming Prize winners credit Hoshin as being a key contributor to their business success. Progressive US companies, like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox, have also adopted Hoshin as their strategic planning process. Almost all Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners use some form of "Hoshin like" planning process.

In its simplest form, Hoshin Kanri is nothing more than a system of forms and rules that encourage employees to analyze situations, create plans for improvement, conduct performance checks, and take appropriate action. In practical application, however, it's much more than forms and rules - Hoshin is a philosophy of management!

Your organization's planning process is ideally designed to deliver the results it is delivering. If you like those results then keep doing what you are doing. If you don't like those results then you must change your planning process.

If your organization:

• Has a beautiful strategic plan collecting dust on the shelf.
• Keeps trotting out the same plan year after year having made little or no progress.
• Has improvement projects working in twenty different directions.
• Can't seem to make progress on strategic objectives because real work gets in the way.
• Has a plan but never checks on progress or holds people accountable.
• Has review meetings that seem to drag on forever and accomplish nothing.
• Manages by opinion rather than by fact.
• Has a great plan but nobody knows about it.

then implementing Hoshin Kanri can help.

Watch a brief overview of the Hoshin Kanri process and see how it can help organizations be more effective.