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

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Sammy Obara: Getting all the stakeholders involved to agree on the destination By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Tuesday, April 30, 2013

As a resource, I would suggest the book Getting the Right Things Done, by Pascal Dennis, or the Hoshin articles by Darril Wilburn. A common theme on those resources indicates that there is one tricky and sometimes difficult to accomplish element of Hoshin Kanri. And that is the early step of bringing all the "liars" to the room (at the same time). Even when that is possible, the job is far from done. I recently facilitated a smaller scale PDCA (Hoshin is a PDCA in larger scale in my view) with the executive team of a multi billion dollar company. Although that same team ...

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Sammy Obara: Transparency allows for better productivity (and can be stressful) By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Monday, April 15, 2013

The same way we have different ways to handle manufacturing scenarios: slow or high mix, low or high volume, custom or standard products, etc, etc… I think there are some distinctions when we talk about office environments.  There are those transactional standard procedures with limited variations, such as the one a postal service clerk would have at the counter.  There are those that can require a lot more decision making and unpredictable resources, perhaps as in mortgage banking.  There are those of knowledge creation, which may seem one of the most difficult ...

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Sammy Obara: Since metrics drive behavior, we want to be careful about how we establish them By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Sunday, January 27, 2013

old question but very current, A friend of mine, ex-Geek Squad, told me BestBuy created an incentive bonus to those store people who sold the highest number of gift cards that month. Gift card sales indeed went up that month, I'm not sure revenues did, though. He said he and his friends sold their gift cards by easily convincing customers to pay for their already planned purchases using a gift card. It worked like this: They would get customers' payments for say a laptop (cash, charge or cheque), buy the gift card with that money, pay for the purchase with that card, and get bonus points ...

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Sammy Obara: Ringi as used by Toyota, ensures that resources will be allocated according to the Hoshin Kanri for that period By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Sunday, December 23, 2012

Great topic.   As to how widespread Ringi is in Toyota, I think most people in Toyota would be well familiar with this practice as it is used in all areas, from production to sales to IT.   In Toyota they refer to it as Ringi Sho, which is roughly translated to Approval Document.  But as some other Japanese or Toyota terminologies, this one should not be just roughly translated.  It brings a much deeper concept which makes it fair to use the Japanese terminology. Ringi as used by Toyota, ensures that resources will be allocated ...

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Sammy Obara: Lean in Sales starts with Genchi Genbutsu and PDCA By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Monday, December 3, 2012

Interesting notes from different perspectives. The little I know about sales and its TPS practice comes from joint efforts when they were teamed up with us, production engineering, in my old days at Toyota. 1)      They did genchi genbutsu to its full extent.  A few examples:  Once, we went w/ sales people to the port of Santos in Brazil to follow up cars arriving from TMC to be sold in the Mercosur market.   Also, when in Japan, their first several weeks on the job included selling cars door to door.  Another example when I ...

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Sammy Obara: You get what you inspect, not what you expect By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Saturday, July 14, 2012

Ensuring a constant focus on lean efforts seems to be a current interest in many organizations. I believe that constant focus has always been a reward for constant inspection.   As manager Doug Jennings from NUMMI used to say, you get what you inspect, not what you expect. It would be very difficult if not impossible to keep the focus and momentum along the lean journey, if you don’t have a structure of constant follow up.  Some of the existing metrics/indicators in your organization, provided that they are correct, will have to be inspected daily, weekly, monthly or with the frequency that is ...

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Sammy Obara: It depends on how many people you really need to make the effort on this specific improvement to take place with its adequate adjustment of standards. By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Sunday, June 3, 2012

Maybe the core question ends up being:  whose role is it to improve? The question seems too simple now: When we say we are improving specifically the "standards", and if by that we mean improving standardized work and its three documents, then very often that is done by a team as small as 2 people, the team member and his supervisor (or many times a process engineer), who can document, do time taking, record steps on paper, etc. On an extended definition, I think that in most cases, when we say we are improving standards, it is implied that there has been an improvement in the process first, so ...

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Sammy Obara: PDCA is the missing element By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Tuesday, April 10, 2012

I'm not sure we are not doing anything about it.  But perhaps what we are doing is not working.  Perhaps the PDCA element is missing. As people say, the problems of today are all solutions from yesterday. One example is the home ownership catastrophe.  Smart people created several avenues to allow millions of people to buy their own home.   Home ownership was solved for people who otherwise would never afford to buy those much-more-than-I-can-afford-mansions.  Those smart people were celebrated by the home buyers, builders, banks, and even the US government.   The great solution for home ownership almost became the great depression of the century. Perhaps it is not that we ...

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Sammy Obara: A good leader will show the way, a lean leader will have the follower find it By Samuel Obara, Co-author of 'Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry' - Last updated: Thursday, March 29, 2012

I think the ability to influence other people and the skills needed to do so would be somewhat similar to both types of leaders, provided they are both good leaders. Perhaps a distinguishing trait between the two leaders can be perceived by observing how they interact with their followers.    While the lean leader will frequently challenge their followers beliefs and paradigms, the good traditional one will put a lot of weight in the praise and motivation. Maybe implicit in the lean leader's approach is the opportunity to learn and develop the thinking.  A good leader will show the way, a lean leader will have the follower find it. In the ...

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