Yokoten is written (横 展); abbreviation of the Japanese word «yokotenkai» 横 展開. means “Across Everywhere “It translates to Horizontal expansion or Horizontal deployment.
Yokoten is all about the transfer of knowledge and best practices from one operation to another throughout the organization. Term used frequently in the industrial field. The meaning is the following: sharing information everywhere in the company, to maximize experiences and knowledge. For example, if a solution has been found that solves an anomaly in a process effectively, the result obtained must be transferred to other areas of the company with similar and non-similar processes, to avoid unnecessary waste of time and energy. If organization has implemented some improvement projects for continual improvement like implementing lean methodology, TPM, JIT, Six Sigma etc. The learning and best practices also comes with the results according to yokoten, rather than keeping the benefits and achievements organization must distribute the learnings and reinvent the results in other areas too
Yokoten as a concept is incredibly powerful and effective, implementing it as a core concept is very difficult.
How to start doing yokoten?
Do not wait for knowledge and best practices to be known by themselves where it can be sent back down to another area to copy or learn from, organizations should encourage their people to go see for themselves, and return to their work area to add their own knowledge and ideas to the things they had learned.
The role of the managers is to make people aware of these ideas and information so that they can go see for themselves, gain the knowledge and improve upon it further.
Recognize and reward not only for the best but to all who participated as well in this way participation of people towards learning and trying will increase. It is not enough to recreate the result; we must also recreate the thinking of that result.
Why?
Yokoten process is a critical step to the organization to becoming a true learning organization. It is one of the organizational capabilities to stand out from others. it is a essential part of long-term success in a lean culture. Achieve a result, and then share the results, learn from it & adopt it wherever applicable, and immediately recreate and multiply the success.
