Hoshin Kanri is a Japanese term meaning: Strategic Planning, Policy Deployment, and Hoshin Planning etc. It was develop in 1950s by Prof.Y ogi Akao.
The crux of entire Hoshin Kanri is as below: “Each person is an expert in his own area and allows authority & ownership to everyone for betterment of an organization.”
There is a Seven step Process for successfully implementing a Hoshin Kanri in your organization. It is:
- Identify the key issues faced by the organization
- Set the goals to achieve/solve the issues
- Develop strategies to achieve the goals
- Establish tactical plan for each strategy
- Implement performance measurement for each process
- Measure them against the tactical plan, strategies, and goals
- Review them for identifying loopholes and opportunities of improvement
- Repeat the exercise
Hoshin Kanri also provides us with tools and tables for our benefit. It insists a management on maintaining and reviewing four tables. They are:
- Hoshin Review Table: Which has the Strategies, Plan and achievement documented
- Strategy Implementation Table: which has details on Plan, process, metrics
- Business Fundamentals Table: which has all the metrics and their performance over a period of time against the targets reviewed frequently
- Annual Planning Table: which has the issues, Objectives & Strategic Plans Vs Achievement.
Periodic review of these tables involving relevant stakeholders at all levels is a must for the success of this practice.
Hoshin Kanri resembles a PDCA cycle on a macro level with a rigid framework for planning, placing issues with right stakeholders, involving the ground level people in problem solving. Thus it is able to bring success when it is implemented properly.