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

Archive for December, 2011

Michael Ballé: Evaluate efforts to improve performance indicators and develop self-competencies By Michael Balle, co-author of The Gold Mine and The Lean Manager - Last updated: Saturday, December 17, 2011

What an interesting question! And difficult to answer, as every organization has its own traditions and practices on the topic. If we’re talking evaluation and not incentive, the one thing I’ve learned the hard way in lean transformations is that you can’t simply focus on results because you’ll tend to give the hardest projects to some of your best guys. If a hospital evaluates its obstetricians on complications at childbirth, it will unwittingly punish the top specialist that gets all the hard cases. Results on key indicators are nonetheless important. What we tend to do first is to separate financials from ...

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Jeff Liker: What are they trying to achieve, what is the process to get there, what concrete actions are they taking By Jeff Liker, author of The Toyota Way and co-author of Toyota Product Development System and Toyota Under Fire - Last updated: Saturday, December 17, 2011

The obvious answer is that it depends.  Any of us who have had Japanese sensei had heard that a lot.  So what does it depend on.  First, it depends one the strategic business purpose of the organization--external.  Second, it depends on the organization's goals for people and culture development-internal.  Third, it depends on the current maturity of the organization to meet the business objectives.  In other words I would want to know what the executive is trying to achieve, how they are thinking about the process of getting there, and what concrete actions they are taking--the hows.   It is critical ...

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Eric Buehrens: What is the right lean way to evaluate executive performance? By Eric Buehrens, Chief Operating Officer, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, USA - Last updated: Friday, December 16, 2011