Team Business Development makes natural business transformation easy

“Lead as though you have no power” – Taiichi Ohno

 

The Toyota way to business success uses natural business transformation

With TBD I have always adopted the Toyota approach to business transformation. This is known as Hoshin Kanri. The thing is that Hoshin Kanri is a ready made system that gives you that all-important natural approach that drives successful business improvements. In essence, when I use Hoshin Kanri I know it guarantees successful change for one overriding reason. And that is that Hoshin Kanri exploits the instinctive way people excel at working in groups.

Using this principle, Toyota originally developed Hoshin Kanri back in the 1960s. Since then, leading manufacturers such as Sony, Intel and Hewlett Packard have adopted Hoshin Kanri to plan change and implement policy. But I have discovered that the really good news is that Hoshin Kanri is not just for the big players. If you are running a small enterprise it is just as applicable to you as well.

Why does Hoshin Kanri work so well?

TBD’s Hoshin Kanri is an all-embracing business operating system delivered by a highly experienced coach. One key aspect is that Hoshin Kanri involves everyone in your organization. As  a result, the system embeds new ways of seeing things, new ways of problem-solving and new ways of thinking into the very fabric of your business. The effect on employee engagement is dramatic. 

Hoshin Kanri’s planning system mobilizes and integrates every business process, sub-system, function and department in your improvement initiative. And this results in the alignment of your diverse resources and activities with your longer-term goals. As a direct consequence you save time, money and energy getting you where you want to go.

Hoshin Kanri is self-funding

With TBD’s Hoshin Kanri system you get a highly sophisticated and user friendly business improvement process. Not only that, but Hoshin Kanri’s is ready to bolt into place and make use of on day one.

In this sense, natural business transformation with Hoshin Kanri is always self-funding. Effectively you make money from the direct savings and opportunities that arise from the improvement planning, training and coaching.

Four key benefits of Hoshin Kanri’s natural business transformation

1. 1. 1. Routinely we get a major hike in operating profit – fast. And this eases cash-flow and also means a big increase in the net worth of an enterprise
      2. But the improved profit does not just spring out of nowhere. Hoshin Kanri accelerates business growth by aligning improvements with both daily operational activity and long term strategy. In turn, these benefits lead to huge efficiency savings and the better retention of satisfied customers.
      3. The collaborative nature of Hoshin Kanri means that employees become highly engaged in the improvement process. The knock on effect is a surge in creative problem-solving, experiential learning, mutual cooperation and coherent planning.
      4. Last but by no means least, Hoshin Kanri reduces the stress inherent in business trading. This benefit applies as much to senior management as to everyone else in the enterprise. As a result of a low stress environment, we see less mistakes, greater attention to detail, less conflict, more coherent decision-making at every level, better staff retention and happier customers. A happy team means happy customers.

 “We’ve achieved more changes in six weeks with these team planning workshops than I’ve seen in twenty years of my time here.” Dave Medhurst Projects Coordinator Steelfields Concrete Batching Plant Manufacturer.

What if you could raise productivity 57%? – Read case study …

For improvement to be transformational it has to be holistic

One important principle is that, if one part of a system is left defective, then the whole system is compromised. After all, any system is only as strong as its weakest element.

This is why Hoshin Kanri’s protocols and procedures work to improve every aspect of your organization ALL AT THE SAME TIME. First off, Hoshin Kanri planning identifies strategic improvement opportunities. It also exposes hidden obstacles or threats to successful change. This phase is called the Business Health Check. The next phase designs appropriate countermeasures and constructs a powerful road map to plan and implement them (I call this road map the Management Action Plan or MAP). This MAP then orchestrates a wide range of improvement projects. Amazingly this can sometimes mean we are planning and implementing as many as 50 or so improvement projects all at once. It is the accumulative power of these projects cascading into place all at once that yields such whole-scale improvement.

To a lot of traditional executives, attempting so many improvements all at the same time sounds ambitious, if not actually impossible. But my long experience with Hoshin Kanri proves that this approach has real advantages over the conventional way of managing change. What we find is that the accumulative effect of large numbers of simultaneously applied improvement projects captures results that are simply unimaginable with other approaches. 

The strength and consistency of this improvement system and its ability to work with human nature are the reasons why TBD Hoshin Kanri programmes achieve an estimated 30 : 1 ROI on client investment.

What if you could double the capacity of your plant? …

“We’ve achieved more changes in six weeks with the team planning workshops than the company has achieved in twenty years of my time here”. Dave Medhurst projects coordinator, Steelfields Ltd Concrete batching plant manufacturer.

Download our free white paper on ‘Hoshin Kanri and

the art of rapid business transformation’

Or you can simply contact me, Jeremy Old. I will be delighted to have an informal, no-obligation chat about your specific needs. Just ring me on 0800 0945 819.

Email: Jeremy@teambusinessdevelopment.co.uk.

Jeremy Old has twenty-five years experience as an independent management coach, specializing in SMEs and NGOs. Equally important he has facilitated 56, Hoshin Kanri assignments across a wide range of industry sectors. He always finds that the system yields consistent success. “The reason is to do with the structured planning process. After all, no one would seriously consider controlling their company finances without a formal accounting system. In much the same way, when I apply Hoshin Kanri in an enterprise, I am, in effect setting up a formal management operating system. And this makes life so much easier for the CEO and the results come much faster.”

In addition to his coaching work, Jeremy is also author of ‘Reinventing  Management Thinking; using science to liberate the human spirit’. His book explains the psychology behind collaborative management systems such as Hoshin Kanri. The science explains why such systems are so much more successful than old fashioned command and control methods. In addition, Jeremy is qualified to MBA level, with a post-graduate diploma in psychotherapy.