A monthly Hoshin review is a meeting where the people who own the plan look at the gap between what they promised and what happened. Then they decide what to do about it. It's the Check and Act of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA), held on a schedule.
A plan can launch with energy in January and stall by the second quarter, because nobody scheduled the reviews. Without a steady rhythm of measuring and correcting, you have an annual planning exercise and not a management system.
Published guidance describes reviews as monthly and quarterly, with weekly and annual variants. Start with monthly. The numbers change enough to talk about, and a miss doesn't have long to grow.
Set up the reviews before the year starts
Do these things once, ahead of time:
- Put all 12 dates on the calendar. Pick a fixed slot, such as the second Tuesday of each month. Choose a date after your month-end numbers close.
- Name who attends. Each owner of an annual objective attends. Keep the group small enough that everyone speaks.
- Name a chair. The chair is usually the owner, COO or plant manager. The chair keeps time and makes sure that each red item ends with a decision.
- Agree on one chart. Use one bowling chart for every objective, in the same format each month. Don't let people bring their own slides.
- Set a deadline for numbers. Owners post their numbers a set time before the meeting, so that everyone reads them ahead of time.
The agenda
This agenda fits in an hour for a small leadership team. Adjust the times to fit your own list.
| Item | Minutes | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Open items from last month | 5 | Read each decision from last month. Did it happen? Yes or no. |
| Read the chart | 5 | Everyone reads the whole chart. The chair names the red items. Nobody presents green items. |
| Red items, one at a time | 35 | The owner states the gap, the cause and the next step. The group asks questions and makes any decision that's needed. |
| Cross-department asks | 10 | Owners raise what they need from each other. |
| Close | 5 | Read back each decision, with its owner and date. |
Rules that keep it honest
- Spend your time on red. A green item needs no discussion. If a meeting spends most of its time on good news, it isn't a review.
- Ask about the process before the person. Start with "What did you find?" A red item is information. If owners get punished for red, the chart turns green and stops telling you anything.
- Require a next step, not an explanation. The owner can explain the miss in one sentence. Then the talk moves to what happens next, who does it and by when.
- Keep old targets visible. A target can change, but the old target and the reason should stay on the record, so that nobody loses track of what was promised.
- Don't debate the budget here. If the talk turns to forecasts and spending, take it to the budget meeting. Hoshin and the budget aren't the same thing.
- Don't skip a month. A skipped review tells everybody what the plan is worth. If the chair can't attend, have a deputy run it.
A worked example
The company is fictional. It's a metal parts maker with 180 employees, one plant and two shifts. The numbers are made up to show the method. They aren't results.
It's the March review. The plant manager chairs, and the objective owners attend. Before the meeting, they all read this chart of the February numbers:
| Objective | Owner | Target | Actual | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| On-time shipments | Plant manager | 91% | 91% | Met |
| Line 2 scrap | Production supervisor | 3.7% | 3.9% | Missed |
| Line 2 changeover, minutes | Production supervisor | 60 | 68 | Missed |
| Supervisors with a finished A3 | Quality manager | 2 | 2 | Met |
Open items. Last month, the quality manager agreed to write the setup-sheet owner into the quality procedure. She did. That item closes in 30 seconds.
Red item: Line 2 scrap. The production supervisor says: "We're at 3.9% against 3.7%. The second-shift A3 is at step 7. At the February 26 check, operators used the new setup sheet on about half of changeovers, so we can't judge the sheet yet. The next check is March 26."
The plant manager asks, "What's keeping the other half from using it?" The answer: the first-shift lead operator hasn't had time to learn the sheets, and overtime is frozen. The plant manager decides to release four hours. She gives an owner and a date: the production supervisor, by March 20.
Red item: changeover. The production supervisor continues: "We're at 68 minutes against 60. We've only run the new sequence on first shift." He proposes moving it to second shift in April. The group sees a dependency: maintenance needs to set up a tool cart on second shift. The production supervisor takes that to the maintenance lead by April 3.
Cross-department asks. The quality manager asks for one lead operator to join a check on purchased castings. The production supervisor agrees to the week of March 23.
Close. The chair reads back three decisions, each with an owner and a date. The meeting ends with the green items never discussed.
Nothing in this review proves that the plan will work. It shows something narrower: everyone knows the gap, and each gap has a next step and a name beside it.
When a red item stays red
Set a rule for this ahead of time. For example: if an item misses two months in a row and the owner has no A3 on it, the owner starts one. Follow the steps in how to write an A3. The rule stops the group from hearing the same explanation every month.
If the owner has an A3 and the item still stays red, look at the whole A3 in the meeting. The target may be wrong, the theory may be wrong or the owner may need help that nobody has given.
The quarterly and annual reviews
Use the same format for a quarterly review, and add one question: do the priorities still make sense? At the annual review, look at the whole X-matrix. Ask what you learned, then use that to draft next year's objectives.
How Run Hoshin handles this
Run Hoshin has no meeting screen for this review, but it supplies what the meeting reads. The KPI board shows each person's goal and latest reading. People type readings in, or an admin imports them from a CSV file. Reports show today or any period, and you can print them or download a CSV file. The app records numbers as people enter them. It doesn't compute a rollup of numbers. Decisions that affect a person's own work go into that person's next one-on-one, where one Approve marks it as held. See what the app does not do yet.
See the period report that your review can read, with no login.