A Process for Achieving Breakthrough Performance

Policy deployment helps business leaders identify and focus on strategic objectives that will drive breakthrough performance, and it establishes a disciplined process for achieving those objectives. Also known as hoshin kanri, hoshin planning or strategy deployment, policy deployment solves two all-too-frequent failures of leadership.

The first leadership failure is not setting truly visionary goals that will lead to step-change business improvements and a clear competitive advantage. Keeping up with market growth—or even holding steady during a period of contraction—is not how market leaders define success. Breakthrough objectives require managers to stop doing what they’ve always done, redirect resources, and do something new.

Once organization leaders have a clear vision of where they would like to go, the second challenge that policy deployment solves is execution. Policy deployment aligns corporate strategy with day-to-day activities at all levels, providing a disciplined framework and system of accountability for making progress toward the breakthrough objectives.

TBM advisors can work with your leadership team to develop breakthrough goals, make everyone understand the business changes required to achieve them, and zero in on the two to three breakthroughs that will deliver the optimum results. As former business leaders, our consultants have years of direct experience applying policy deployment. They can help you establish appropriate three- to five-year breakthrough objectives, translate those objectives into annual goals and priorities, and set concrete performance targets.

Web-based Policy Deployment and Metrics Tracking

Beyond the basic concepts, it can take a great deal of time for managers both to understand how the policy deployment process works and to manage the paper-based X matrices, action plans, and bowling charts that are used to maintain organizational alignment. TBM’s Dploy Strategy^™ web-based approach for managing the policy deployment process can dramatically shorten the learning curve. It eliminates much of non-value-added administrative time that is often required to implement policy deployment across multiple sites and to coordinate the activities of cross-functional teams.

TBM recently introduced a real-time, web-based application that helps you effectively monitor, measure and achieve business results with Policy Deployment, key performance metrics and best practice sharing. Learn more at the Dploy Solutions website. It features a series of online dashboards that feed the appropriate information to managers and executives, allowing them to monitor progress, to see obstacles and to re-direct resources to keep initiatives on track. When problems arise, project teams can focus on identifying root causes and developing effective countermeasures. Dploy Solutions speeds the transformation of a lean company into a problem-solving, results-driven organization.

Why Commit to the Policy Deployment Process

• Align company resources with critical tasks
• Speed execution of strategic objectives
• Efficiently transform your strategy into measurable results
• Focus the entire organization on breakthrough goals versus daily fire-fighting
• Develop and reinforce a culture of disciplined, continuous improvement
• Achieve global visibility on current projects and results

“Your business is perfectly designed for the results you’re getting. If leadership wants to achieve different or better results, they have to be willing to change the design of the business.”
Mark Kohler,
Former V.P. of Manufacturing for Snap-On, Inc.