“Strategic Deployment: How to Think Like Toyota”
Industry Week
November 2007, pp. 34-37
This article argues that Toyota’s success derives to a great extent from its planning and execution system, known by various names as hoshin kanri, hoshin planning, strategy deployment, or policy deployment. It “aims to formulate clear corporate objectives and goals, disseminating and aligning those objectives throughout all levels of the organization, and then creating plans of action to achieve those objectives.”
The article identifies the key elements of hoshin planning as:
- Hoshin planning is driven by the organization’s vision, not today’s problems
- It is a system to translate the vision into tangible and measurable objectives for achieving the breakthroughs
- Alignment is created by cross-functional planning to achieve short-term objectives each year
- Hoshin planning fosters learning through the review process
- The Plan-Do-Check–Act cycle of continuous improvement is at the heart of the hoshin process
- “Catch-ball” is the driving force of alignment, clarification, and employee involvement
In Industry Week’s 2007 Census of Manufacturers, 26.9% of US manufacturing plants say strategic or policy deployment occurs in their facilities. This is especially common in plants of 500 employees or more, where the figure is 53.3%.
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