Hoshin Kanri – in widespread use?

The discipline of Hoshin Kanri is intended to help an organization:

• Focus on a single goal
• Communicate that goal to all leaders
• Involve all leaders in planning to achieve the goal
• Hold participants accountable for achieving the goals.

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Translations of this Japanese phrase vary widely; its most accurate expression appears to be “HoShin Kanri,” which may be translated approximately to “control of direction” (“ho” – “method“; “shin” – “compass“; and “kanri” – “control”). “Hoshin Kanri” is a method of strategic planning that focuses on “vertical alignment” – i.e., ensuring that the business’s vision, objectives, performance standards, and review processes are communicated thoroughly to and understood by all members of an organization, from top to bottom, via the constant repetition of a four-stage process:

1. Defining and establishing a specific, limited number of policy and strategic objectives that will further the business’s mission;
2. “deployment” of (i.e., communication and setting into motion of) these objectives throughout all levels of the corporate hierarchy;
3. Implementation of the objectives and the changes they require, by making them an integral part of daily activities; and
4. Review of performance and results; each of these steps occurs both up and down the corporate hierarachy, in a continuous process of input/refinement/feedback traded among all employees at all levels, known as “catchball.”

In the West, often called “hoshin planning” or “QPD” (quality policy deployment”), although some experts regard “hoshin kanri” as referring to the combination of both long-range “hoshin planning” and its dailycounterpart, known as “nijiro kanri.”

How wide spread is the use of Hoshin Kanri? Anyone know?

Quality Handbook

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Comments

By Curt on May 30th, 2008 at 6:37 pm

We are performing Hoshin Kanri in a Healthcare system. It feeds extremely well into our Process Improvement Group.

We are ready to take another step in Hoshin to have it completely system-wide and corporate endorsed/participated. Due to the emphasis in Healthcare on benchmarking, I am hoping to find another healthcare system that is successfully using Hoshin as their primary means to operationalize their strategic plan. Anybody out there?

By John on June 3rd, 2008 at 12:32 pm

Curt, I work for a major medical device supplier, and we have fully intergated Hoshin Planning as a means to operationalize our strategic plan. If you are interested we could share.

John

By Curt on June 4th, 2008 at 3:06 pm

Very interested John. I’ll keep things as confidential as you need and we’d be glad to share with you where we are as well. Please send me an email to my personal account and we can coordinate from there.

curtniekamp@yahoo.com

By Mike on July 11th, 2008 at 11:52 pm

Is this like some new organization behavior chart

By Aaron on January 19th, 2009 at 6:21 pm

I work for a medical device engineering firm, mostly the R&D but we're beginning to move into the manufacturing world. From what I've read here, it seems that Hoshin Kanri is more of a corporate strategic system than a quality control system such as Six Sigma. Is that the case?

By qamanager on January 19th, 2009 at 8:40 pm

Its as basic as: Define goals at the company, division and department level; grasp the current state and the gap between it and the desired state; choose appropriate metrics; and continue to plan, check, do and adjust.