Hoshin Kanri is a method used for strategic planning.  The term refers to "policy deployment" or "directional deployment."  The process of hoshin kanri aligns an organization vertically as well as horizontally .  In general there are 7 steps to the hoshin or directional planning process.  

1. Establish Vision.
2. Assess current state.
3. Set annual objectives.
4. Build a plan for implementation.
5. Execute your plan.
6. Review, evaluate and adjust as necessary (Monthly).
7. Repeat (annually).

  The deployment of Hoshin Kanri will often start as a top - down process but as the organization reaches the second and third phase of hoshin planning it should become a top - down and bottom - up process that involves management, project teams and other resources to align resources and gain consensus of the direction.  This process is often referred to as catchball, nemawashi or our own personal ©Vision methodology.  Hoshin Kanri strives to get every employee pulling in the same direction at the same time. It achieves this by aligning the strategic goals of the company with the tactical plans of middle management and the work performed by all employees.

  The house of Toyota is a graphical representation of the Toyota Production System depicted in the form of a house.  Taiichi Ohno was given credit for much of the systems development.  The Toyota Production System works together with 5 key elements:​

  Hansei is a fundamental attribute of any type of improvement.  The term Hansei refers to the reflection and recognition of one's own actions.  Hansei is often used to recognize one's own mistakes and commit to taking the appropriate actions in order to resolve and avoid re-occurrence of one's mistakes.  The Hansei can be performed in a team environment or in a personal reflective manner, either way it is important that teams and individuals stretch their mind enough to find something they can improve upon.

Challenge:
   Reflect for 5-10 minutes today.  During your reflection decide on one important area of your life you would like to change.  Share your reflection in the comments below.

  A huddle is an action by a team to strategize, support and motivate one another towards accomplishing or aligning objectives and goals.  Huddles are typically held before an activity takes place.  Huddles can be held in any area or department of an organization, they do not need specific rooms just a format to conduct the huddle.  The main difference between a huddle and a meeting is both how it is conducted and the amount of time the huddle takes compared to a meeting.  Huddles can be performed in under 7 minutes.

How to perform a huddle:
  Organizations should work to establish the most effective format for huddles.  This format is a good starting point to begin holding huddles.

1. What did you accomplish yesterday?
2. What do you need to do today?
3. Is there anything preventing you from doing that today?
4. Assign actions.

Share with the community:

  What tactics/tools do you use in your organization that help create an effective and efficient value adding method of communication?

  The House of Quality, is a diagram whose structure resembles that of a house.  The tool aids in determining how a product/service is living up to customer defined attributes. Although quite intricate, it is capable of storing a lot of information and comparing large amounts of data used for defining the relationship between customer desires and the firm/product capabilities.  The house of quality works through a six step process:
​

1. Identify customer attributes (voice of the customer).
2. Identify supporting features and generate those attributes. 
3. Comparision of requirements and design requirements .
4. Assign priorities to customer requirements and technical features.
5. Benchmark or evaluate competitors.
6. Identify technical features that will be deployed in the final product/service design.

  The house of quality is part of the quality function deployment (QFD) process and forces engineers, designers and developers to think about customer needs.  The house also helps teams in creating a crossfunctional design so that probelms are not built into a new service or part.  

  Hard Savings are the tangible and identifiable savings as opposed to that realized from not spending.  If we look at hard savings from a project perspective it can be defined as those savings that allow the organization, team or department to do "more" or the "same" amount of work with the same or less resource use.  

Examples of Hard Savings:

1. Reduced cost of operations.
2. Reduced cost of production related to units.
3. Reduced overhead.
4. Increased revenue with same resources.

Question:  What is one other type of hard savings that you can think of?  Have you ever had to document hard savings?

**Place answers in the comments tab.**

  Heijunka is a japanese term that can be translated as product smoothing or load leveling.  The heijunka technique is used to assist and in many ways facilitate Just in time production.  Heijunka is often used to smooth out production both internally and externally.  Heijunka gives organizations the ability to efficiently and effectively meet customer demands without having to produce excessive batches of work.  Additionally heijunka helps to keep inventories to a minimum level, lower holding costs, increase resource power and improve the overall lead time of an organization.

​Example of Heijunka Board:

  As you can see in the photo above heijunka helps us to understand our production sequence in terms of both volume and style of product.

Volume Leveling:  To level production by volume or quantity a Takt Time must be established.  Establishing Takt time helps us to understand how many units we need to make and in what amount of time each of the individual units needs to be made in.  

Style/Quantity Leveling:  When looking to level production based on style or quantity you must also first understand what the Takt Time is first.  Traditionally using a batch production approach understanding the time it takes to keep up with demand helps you to calculate the appropriate number of resources at each station, however this often results in batched production which builds a lot of waste into the process.  The key to leveling style or quantity is being able to answer the question; where is the waste in the process?  Some common examples of waste are slow changeovers excessive waiting, overproduction, and motion.  Once you have identified the waste in the process you can then begin to reduce changeover times, transportation, inventory (batching), overproduction (batching) and any other of the 8 forms of waste you may have discovered.  This gives companies the ability to reduce batch sizes and establish tactical production buffers so that lines do not lag behind or worse yet shutdown.

  The "hidden factory" is the set of activities in a process or value stream that result in the reduction of quality or velocity of a business process.  The reference to hidden insinuates that the process is not known to individuals who might be seeking to improve the process.  

Examples of the Hidden Factory Concept

1. Rework
2. Muda
3. Workarounds

  Hypothesis testing is a statistical test that is used to determine whether or not there is enough evidence contained within sample data to confirm a condition.  The hypothesis test looks into two types of tests null and alternative.

  The histogram is a type of bar graph which is used to visually display the frequency or spread of data in a data set.  When a histogram is used in six sigma they graph the amount of variation in a process or product.  The pictorial nature of the histogram lets people see patterns that are difficult to see in a simple table of numbers. The histogram is one of the seven basic quality tools.