Category: Hoshin Kanri

Strategic planning is a formal, organized, proactive and structured process used by an organization to define its vision, goals, and objectives. The process of strategic planning also includes planning for, and the allocation of the resources needed to reach the stated goals and objectives of the organization. It is the roadmap for achieving your organization’s […]

Today, irrespective of industry, corporations must focus on speed, efficiency and customer value to be globally competitive. Lean and Six Sigma are both powerful tools for improving quality, productivity, profitability and market competitiveness. While Six Sigma is focused on reducing variation using a problem solving approach and statistical tools, Lean focuses on eliminating waste and […]

A high performance culture is the result of high performance actions. An organization should strive to implement actions which deliver the desired performance and assess the results of these actions on the culture. If these actions are successful, performance targets are achieved and a high-performance culture ensues. The pursuit of performance gains starts with defining […]

Some companies approach strategic planning in a way that lends ammunition to those who would question its purpose. Typically, during strategic planning time, executives sequester themselves in a retreat-like setting armed with sales and market projections and some semblance of customer input. The output of this event is a nice, bound presentation that sits on […]

Many companies which choose not to utilize Lean and Six Sigma as key components of how they implement change in their organization say it is because the methodologies are too complicated for their business environment. They claim that they do not have the time to build an infrastructure, train Black Belts and Green Belts and […]

The new millennium brought a great deal of change in the marketplace. As the financial scandals of the 1990s came to light, new regulations were drafted and put into place to avoid such occurrences in the future. U.S. financial institutions must comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which came on the heels of the Enron scandal, […]

Hoshin planning, which focuses on achieving a vital annual stretch goal, has been used successfully by Toyota and other companies in Japan since the 1960s and some top-tier companies in the United States and elsewhere. However, interest in using Hoshin planning now appears to be growing. Bank of America, for example, has made a very […]