Lean Policy Deployment (Hoshin Kanri)

Is your organisation struggling to make sustained (lean) improvements? Are your employees fully ‘bought into’ the changes necessary to make your organisation leaner? You are not alone - many organisations struggle to understand properly how to implement the basic five lean principles for continuous improvement which are:

  1. Understand what your customer(s) value and how to delight them
  2. Understand how, when & where ‘value’ is created in your enterprise
  3. Understand how to make ‘value’ truly flow through your enterprise
  4. Understand how to pull value through your enterprise
  5. Pursue perfection in all of the above

All too often, by the use of poor language or a lack of clear thinking, organisations confuse their objectives, targets and actions; believe it or not this happens at the most senior levels in some organisations and the result is underperformance or worse still, a complete failure to align the organisation to the needs of customers (the short road to ruin!). Too many company Vision or Mission statements are seen by the company’s workforce as unconnected, over-complex and irrelevant or even completely meaningless to their every day work activities.

Policy deployment model

Lean Policy Deployment is a structured process we use to help organisations focus clearly on what their customers need and align all their resources to creating ’customer value’ through the implementation of the five lean principles above. It effectively links a company7rsquo;s top level goals / vision with measurable, clearly assigned actions and in the process ensures ‘employee buy-in’ / ownership for what needs to be done.

Example policy deployment matrix

What does Lean Policy Deployment look like? It is a series of simple linked matrices (minimum of one constructed for each level in the organisation), colour coded to provide immediate visibility & understanding of:-

  • The relevant goals
  • The relevant measures of performance (MOPs) that indicate whether or not the goals are being achieved
  • The actions required to achieve the required performance
  • The owners of these actions

What kind of organisations can use this process? Any SME or larger enterprise can use this process to make significant performance improvements by better aligning their organisations and delighting their customers. Below is a list of just a few companies that have used this process:

  • Bank of America
  • Goodrich Inc
  • Hewlett Packard
  • Xerox
  • Texas Instruments
  • Snecma / SAFRAN
  • BALTA Group
  • HMRC

Why Implement Lean Policy Deployment? The concise and structured approach provided by this process allows your organisation to:-

  • Only focus on those things that are really needed (i.e. stop wasteful activities)
  • Align all the workforce in understanding and meeting the needs of the customers
  • Discard meaningless MOPs and reduce the total number into something more ‘manageable’
  • Support the development of accountable teams / team-working (employee buy-in)
  • Link the smallest relevant activity directly to the organisation’s goals/vision

How can Ad Manum Consultants Ltd help you to implement Lean Policy Deployment?

  • Through our independent experienced consultants, who have used the process many times before, we will provide the necessary training to implement and use this process together with all associated materials
  • We will challenge you to ensure your vision & goals are realistic and make sure that the supporting MOPs, targets and actions are all properly aligned
  • We will ensure you do not fall into the trap of trying to ‘shoe-horn’ this process into your organisation without the necessary buy-in from all levels
  • We will ensure that the flow down of the process and the flow back of information is consistent
  • We make sure that the necessary patience and good sense is exercised to overcome the challenges to traditional ‘command & control’ management hierarchies that naturally occur when deploying this process; we educate your managers to become better leaders through allowing this process to work

Contact us today for a free no-obligation initial assessment of what Lean Policy Deployment can do for your organisation...