In a lean management system, hoshin kanri—translated as management’s compass—is the discipline that strengthens alignment from the board room to the frontline, so that all employees see their work reflected in the organization’s strategy.

Without hoshin, an organization’s strengths are left unsupported and its lean improvement work directionless.

Your strategy will be treated as an ongoing process, not a seasonal activity, in which leaders continually monitor changing internal and external forces and adjust resource deployment to maintain focus and achieve their most important measures of success.

How Hoshin Kanri Works

Working closely with your executive team, we help transform your strategy discipline by leveraging your existing strategic planning analytics and creating a robust structure and method for strategy deployment.

Your teams will learn to clarify expectations and capabilities so they can perform at higher levels, as well as employ consensus-driven methods that facilitate agreement on near-term action plans and long-range outcomes.

By developing your managers’ skills, goals and a visually managed system can be cascaded throughout the organization. Execution can also become more effective, project management structures fortified, and the hoshin practice becomes part of everyday habits. We’ll also deepen your board or governing body’s understanding of lean and appropriate engagement in hoshin and strategy deployment.

Benefits of Hoshin Kanri

Hoshin kanri can help:

• Develop a higher performing, strategically focused executive team
• Create a highly focused set of strategic priorities and strengthen the deployment to and alignment with daily operations
• Evolve from a traditional strategic planning approach and create a more dynamic process for deploying strategy across your organization
• Establish greater discipline in managing your strategy and a deeper emphasis on underlying project management
• Augment or replace slow mechanisms of management accounting with the ability to solve problems in close to real time
• Augment or replace slow management accounting mechanisms with the ability to solve problems in real time
• Promote interorganizational cost management by providing a framework for customers, producers, and suppliers to plan and execute in a coordinated fashion

To learn more about hoshin kanri, watch our webcast.