Productivity and Quality Improvement
2.3 Hoshin Kanri
Levels and extent of service tend to be determined by political as opposed to market considerations, especially for subsidized and zero-priced services;
Public employees often evident a lack of clarity about the multiple customers and stakeholders involved, even in single transactions; and Problems of scale and complexity frequently are associated with large,
centralized public organizations, and sometimes, with large-scale tech- nological bases for their operations.
TABLE5.9 (Continued) IV. Initiate Hoshin planning.
1. Identify the mission of the organization (including relevant goals and objectives to implement the mission).
2. Clarify customer needs in light of the mission of the organization.
3. Identify the critical processes involved in servicing the customers of the orga- nization and establish the performance measures applicable to these processes.
4. Formulate the “vision” of the organization (i.e., its long-range goal or target, built on the current mission of the organization and value statements of top management).
5. Identify priority breakthrough items in key areas of service—items that must be initiated as a first critical step through achieving the organization’s vision.
6. Disseminate results of organizational breakthrough planning and initiate break- through planning efforts at the division and unit levels.
V. Form daily management teams.
1. Daily management teams are composed of individuals who normally work together on the process under review. The roles of the team leader, facilitator, and team members must be clearly defined.
2. A problem-solving process appropriate to the activities of the team should be identified and adopted to provide a common technique and language for process improvement.
3. The discussions of the team in the application of the problem-solving process should be full documented to ensure replication of successful approaches.
VI. Establish cross-functional management teams.
1. The purpose of cross-functional teams is to target team efforts on key projects that cross functional lines and to evaluate and improve the work of ongoing study teams.
2. Cross-functional teams can integrate studies across divisional lines and improve systems at the policy level.
3. Cross-functional teams can select projects aligned with priority breakthrough items.
VII. Reporting, recognition, and awards.
1. A series of regular reports should be prepared by the teams and presented to top management.
2. Prompt implementation of team recommendation provides tangible recognition of the efforts of the study teams.
3. Awards should be provided for outstanding team or individual performance based on savings (time and money), uniqueness of solutions, and importance to the organization.
Source: Adapted from L. Edwin Coate. Implementing Total Quality Management in a University Setting. Oregon State University, Eugene, OR. July 1990.
Principles of hoshin kanriwere first introduced as part of efforts to train Japanese managers and engineers in management techniques after World War II.
This training included the work of Walter Shewhart and, in particular, the application of statistical quality control (SQC) techniques. Many members of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) felt that SQC techniques were a major factor contributing to the United States’ victory. In 1950, the JUSE invited Dr. Shewhart to participate in an eight-day management training course.
He was unavailable, and W. Edward Deming, a Columbia University professor who had studied and applied Shewhart’s methods, was recommended as the guest lecturer at this event. During a two-month period, Deming trained hundreds of managers, engineers, and scholars in Japan, focusing on three key areas: the use of the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle, the importance of understanding the causes of variations between planned activities and actual performance, and process control through the use of control charts.
The idea of an integrated, organization-wide management system, bound together by a planning system, began to further develop in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s. These efforts were heavily influenced by
The Deming Prize, established in Japan in 1951, which from the outset called for a system of planning.
Widespread use of the PDCA cycle and the “seven QC tools” for man- agement.
The 1954 publication in Japanese of The Practice of Management, by Peter Drucker, which proposed the concept of management by objectives (MBO).
JUSE-sponsored lectures by Joseph M. Juran on the role of management in promoting quality control activities.
The divisional system of General Motors, which was a novel concept at that time.
In 1954, a visit by Joseph Juran led to a major shift in Japan’s quality approach, from dealing primarily with technology to an overall concern for total quality management. Juran asserted that management must assume primary re- sponsibility in leading quality improvement efforts by defining the organization’s quality policy and assuring that everyone understood and supported it.
By the late 1960s, many Japanese companies had implemented MBO, and a number of leading companies—Bridgestone Tire, Toyota, Komatsu Man- ufacturing, and Matsushita—had developed their own innovative management approaches, going far beyond the original concept. These innovations, in turn, emerged from the significant expertise of these companies in statistical quality control, which at the time existed only in Japan.
The term hoshin kanri, referring to this new approach, became widely accepted in Japan in the mid-1970s. By the late 1970s, the first books on the
subject began to appear, distilling the experiences accumulated in industry into a formalization of principles. The first symposium on hoshin kanri was held in Japan in 1981. In 1989, the Japanese Association of Standards published a series of works dealing withhoshin kanri practices.
A few leading companies in the United States began to implement their own versions of hoshin kanri during the late 1980s. Included among these companies were Hewlett-Packard, Procter & Gamble, Florida Power & Light, Intel, and Xerox. While many of these companies shared their experiences in the public domain, Western literature on this subject only started to become available in the early 1990s.
Various names have been used to describe this approach, such as policy deployment, management by planning, and hoshin planning. None of these terms captures the subtleties of the original meaning, however, and all are slightly misleading in some way. These terms are not in widespread use. Even in those organizations that have implemented hoshin kanri principles, most employees are simply aware of the workings of the system in use, and only a few specialists need to know more than this.
Hoshin kanri is one of the pillars of TQM and encompasses every part of an organization. It is involved in selecting and defining a small number of key targets for the organization to pursue and then in contributing to the accomplishment of these objectives.Hoshin kanridiffers from other systems of planning in that its makes extensive use of quality management principles and techniques.