Joel Stanwood: Where to start with Hoshin Kanri in a not-yet-lean company?
A mid-sized manufacturing company is finalizing its strategic plan and believes that it is time to begin Hoshin Kanri. The company is not currently operating as a Lean Enterprise -- functional silos create significant amount of waste which results in poor product/service quality and high cost to serve. Additionally, different departments and regions of the company are "pulling in different directions." What advice, resources, and lessons learned can you provide to the managers of this company to successfully organize and deploy Hoshin?
Posted on April 27, 2013
Author Archive
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By Jamie Flinchbaugh, Co-Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center
- Last updated: Sunday, June 17, 2012 |
The question asked is "Are work standards individual or collective?"
Standardization is a very difficult topic for most people in lean. The difficulty starts with a past practice and perception that standards are something we give people to force them to do work in a way that might not even be the most productive. Because of this, the perception of standardization is often far from its intention.
Our preference is to use the words high agreement of both what and how. The reason for these words is it conveys what we believe to be more the intent of standardization. It ...
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By Jamie Flinchbaugh, Co-Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center
- Last updated: Sunday, November 6, 2011 |
Until someone finds the Fountain of Youth, leadership changes in organizations are inevitable. Large corporations and small family-owned businesses all have to deal with it. But sometimes they appear to occur at the wrong time. Just as your lean journey appears to have some momentum, all of a sudden the leadership changes.
The leadership change might be at a plant level, an executive level, or the CEO themselves. In any of these cases, leadership changes can cause shifts to our momentum.
But we're caught by surprised. And anytime that we're caught unprepared for something that is inevitable, we have only ...
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By Jamie Flinchbaugh, Co-Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center
- Last updated: Monday, June 27, 2011 |
What is the hardest field to apply lean? It doesn't seem to matter what field you're in, they all think theirs is the hardest. And they can back it up with evidence. One of the most frequent questions I get is "who else in my industry is doing lean?", because no one wants to be first, and no one wants to be last.
There is a wide range of answers to this question in the series so far, and all of them valid. I'm not sure which is the hardest, but every field of work and every functional application brings its ...
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By Jamie Flinchbaugh, Co-Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center
- Last updated: Sunday, May 29, 2011 |
The question asked was "what counts as 'lean success'?"
Albert Einstein once said:
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
I see most people making mistakes when trying to evaluate success. They try to measure lean success as if it is a program. What's the easiest way to measure a program? Activity! Yet we should not confuse activity with productivity. Lean programs are measured by means such as the number of people trained or the number of improvement events held, yet these activities do not a lean journey make. They are only inputs. And even ...
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By Jamie Flinchbaugh, Co-Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center
- Last updated: Tuesday, March 15, 2011 |
The question asked was “what is the lean approach to capital?” In some ways, this is the wrong question. The reason is that the lean organization and the lean thinker is not looking to put capital to work. Capital is just a solution to a problem. Capital is not just another budget line item that must be consumed and deployed.
It starts with the ideal state. When a team has a vision of the ideal state for a process, it seeks any solution that gets it closer to that solution. When a team lacks such a vision, it reaches and grasps. ...
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By Jamie Flinchbaugh, Co-Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center
- Last updated: Wednesday, January 5, 2011 |
The latest Lean Edge question is How do Lean organizations develop their employees if Lean considers expenditure of resources other than for creation of value to be wasteful?
First, a true lean organization isn’t obsessed with waste. If anything, they are obsessed with value. Waste is anything more than the absolutely minimum required to add value to a product or service; waste is not just anything that doesn’t create value. I can’t imagine much value can be delivered without the right skills and capabilities in the organization. Therefore, I don’t think there is any conflict between developing employees and waste elimination.
Second, ...
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By Jamie Flinchbaugh, Co-Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center
- Last updated: Thursday, December 16, 2010 |
First, I disagree that lean is a "production practice." But that's not really the question, so I'll move on.
I agree with Art's description - many people see different things in it. It wouldn't be fair to say that lean is NOT about waste elimination, but it's equally unfair to say it's all about that. As Anais Nin said, "we don't see things as they are. We see them as we are." But let's get back to waste and it's role.
Waste is the flip-side of the coin of value. Assuming that lean is just about eliminating waste means that value is ...
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By Jamie Flinchbaugh, Co-Author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To Lean and co-founder of the Lean Learning Center
- Last updated: Sunday, October 31, 2010 |
How do you set objectives with lean?
I won't start from the beginning, because there are already so many quality posts here in response to the question. I will try to add to it with a couple of the more subtle points that I hope help you in turning these thoughts into action:
1. Work on the really hard problems
I notice that many organizations have problems that they write down and those that they don't. The problems that have known solutions are written down. Those that people have no clue how to solve are not written down. But we must. We will ...
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Sandrine Olivencia