Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise: Developing Competitive Capabilities and Managing Profit

At the heart of Lean and Six Sigma is the same, unique business operating system: hoshin kanri. It is a method of strategic planning and a tool for managing complex projects, a quality operating system geared to ensuring that organizations faithfully translate the voice of the customer into new products, and a business operating system that ensures reliable profit growth.

The true power of hoshin kanri, however, is two-fold -- it is a superior organizational learning method as well as a competitive resource development system.

Hoshin Kanri for the Lean Enterprise, by Tom Jackson, explains how you can implement, identify and manage the critical relationships among your markets, design characteristics, production systems, and personnel to satisfy your customers and beat your competition.

This practical workbook provides:

• A new understanding of hoshin kanri as a grand experimental design implemented through a system of team agreements.
• Clear explanations of the steps of hoshin kanri.
• A measure of overall business effectiveness used to determine the focus of corporate strategy.
• A new, improved X-matrix that incorporates a lean "balanced scorecard" for identifying improvement opportunities and converting them readily into bottom line results as a value stream P&L in terms that financial managers and accountants can understand and support.

This workbook will show you the mechanics of implementing hoshin kanri, so that you can systematically improve your brand equity, implement Lean manufacturing and Six Sigma, and integrate your suppliers into a Lean and Six Sigma organization.

About the Author

Tom Jackson is the former CEO of Productivity, Inc., and author of Implementing a Lean Management System, Corporate Diagnosis (Productivity Press), and The President’s Diagnosis (Lean Press). Tom has been a student of lean enterprise since 1988, when he copyedited Hiroyuki Hirano’s JIT Factory Revolution for Productivity Press. He became so fanatical about lean that he left his comfortable position at the University of Vermont to start a lean consulting company—in Malaysia! There he learned that the powerful techniques of lean enterprise—JIT, SMED, TPM, kanban, etc.—were only half of the story of Toyota’s great success. The other half of the story was hoshin kanri and a revolution in the structure of modern business organizations. In 2003, Tom and his partner Don Makie founded taktX LLC, a lean management consultancy where Tom has applied hoshin kanri to the making of window and door seals, refrigerators, grain bins, and chicken feeders, the management of quality systems, and the delivery of healthcare, mental health, and social services. Tom is always thinking of new ways to get people to see both sides of lean.