KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

Have you seen the LifeLock commercial about the bank robbery? A group of robbers comes in with baseball bats and demand that everyone get on the floor. The customers ask the uniformed security officer to do something. Instead, he says, “Oh, I’m not a security guard. I’m a security monitor. I only notify people if there’s a robbery.” He looks at the customers and reports, “There’s a robbery.” The n...

A friend who knows that I am interested in continuous improvement techniques of all sorts was visiting a relative in the ER in a California hospital. She sent me this photo. If you are a frequent reader of this blog, you probably know why this upset me, but I think it is worth listing the reasons it made me cringe.

Presenter: Matthew Cannistraro, Operations Analyst at J.C. Cannistraro In this webinar, you will learn: Background of JC Cannistraro and the factors that led to the need for improvement software The importance of and methods for capturing improvement where it happens Examples of bottom-up improvement that you can learn from The role of technology in spreading bottom-up improvement Actionable advic...

Rapid improvement events are an important tool in the Kaizen toolbox. They are great for ensuring energy gets focused on a particularly challenging problem or one that needs to be solved pronto. We’ve seen them produce terrific, long-lasting results. We’ve also seen them devolve into a disorganized mess. Without clear direction and effective communication, the event can become a demoralizing waste...

During a typical Gemba Walk, a manager or supervisor visits the place where work gets done. He or she observes as processes and tasks are carried out, asks questions, and reflects on what was seen. After careful consideration, they would ask for (or potentially offer) ideas for improvement or begin a PDSA cycle. This is an effective way for managers to get a first-hand look at what is happening wi...

Matthew Cannistraro, of the J.C. Cannistraro company, is one of those leaders and customers. He gave an excellent presentation at last year’s user conference, a talk that was focused on capturing “bottom up” improvement ideas in the workplace. The talk was so well received that we asked him to expand upon it for a webinar… and that’s coming up on February 23. I had a brief discussion wit...

Readers of this blog know that the Lean approach to business management has taken root far outside of the manufacturing sector. It is used by healthcare organizations, software development firms, financial institutions, and even institutes of higher education. The construction industry likewise has benefited from applying and adapting the fundamental principles of Lean. Construction is a unique in...

We are in the continuous improvement business, so it is not surprising that we sometimes talk to HR managers and other leaders who have been sold on the idea that an electronic suggestion box is the way to gather employee ideas for improvement. Physical suggestion boxes have been around probably as long as there have been businesses, so why not modernize the approach by making it digital? We appla...

Mark Graban & Dr. Greg Jacobson In this episode: How did you guys meet? What are some inventive methods to improve senior management visibility and support for continuous improvement (CI)? How can we sustain improvement activities and prevent slipping back to old habits? Do we need to have everybody involved in every aspect of our quality improvement efforts? One trainer said we did... but that's...

Post by Dr. Greg Jacobson, read by Mark Graban Management expert James P. Womack, Ph. D., is the founder and senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc., a nonprofit training, publishing, conference, and management research company chartered in August 1997 to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean thinking, based initially on Toyota’s business system. He, along with D...

Wow! The daily lessons served up by the current political climate in the United States just keep coming. I’m quite certain nobody intended to help us gain these insights, but why bypass the opportunity! So here we go. Some people call their improvement cycle PDCA, as outlined by Walter Shewhart, while others refer to it as PDSA, as evolved by W. Edwards Deming. Whatever the terminology, we often f...

Our CEO, Dr. Greg Jacobson, has a cartoon hanging in his office. It must be pretty popular, because I found out Mark Graban actually referenced it a few years ago in this post. The cartoon depicts a medieval king preparing to fight a battle with swords and shields - and a guy selling machine guns. The king is so focused on his next task, he is ignoring the salesman trying to sell him modern weapon...

An increasing number of institutes of higher education are introducing the principles of Lean and other continuous improvement methodologies in order to improve efficiency and operational effectiveness. This might be surprising - even a bit controversial - in a sector that doesn’t produce products per se, but the underlying principles of respect for people, incremental change, and the elimination...

KaiNexus is pretty lucky in that it has a staff of amazingly talented and knowledgeable individuals. Our Vice-President of Improvement & Innovation Services, Mark Graban, is certainly no exception. Graban has over 20 years of experience practicing Lean both in manufacturing and in healthcare, is the author of several books including Lean Hospitals, and is the founder of LeanBlog.org. Recently Jeff...

Corrective and Preventative Action (CAPA) is an effective improvement technique that helps organizations investigate the root causes of any known problems or potential risks. The corrective action addresses something problematic that has happened, while the preventative action aims to avoid potential future problems. Corrective actions happen in response to things like product defects, identified...

As a sales executive for KaiNexus, I speak with Lean leaders and continuous improvement gurus daily. Most of them are excited about continuous improvement, but they are frustrated with the lack of supporting technology. However, once they decide to solve the technology problem, the face a new challenge - getting a new tool or platform approved and purchased. This is called the Buyer’s Journey, and...

The 5S technique is part of a broader set of management practices known as visual management or visual control. Although these tools are often used by organizations that employ the Lean management or the Toyota Production System, they can be used by any organization seeking to optimize workspaces and processes. 5S can be implemented without technology to support it, but our clients have found that...

Visual management, sometimes called visual control, is the technique of communicating information using visual signals rather than text or written instruction. People process visual images much more quickly than text, so the approach is an excellent way to achieve efficiency and clarity of communications. We often think of huddle boards or Kanban cards when we think about visual management, but it...

According to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a rapid improvement cycle is a, "Quality improvement method that identifies, implements and measures changes made to improve a process or a system.” In other words, it is an organized approach to making processes better in short order. You don’t use a rapid improvement cycle to shoot for the moon, but rather to make incremental changes that add up t...

How to Manage Your Improvement Metrics More Efficiently and Effectively In this webinar, you will learn: Some of the common mistakes people make when looking at performance metrics and the resulting problems Simple, but statistically valid and effective methods for creating, maintaining, and reviewing charts over time When to react and ask “what happened?” when reviewing new data points in a chart...

Kaizen events are an effective way to implement significant improvements in short order. They are used to tackle all sorts of issues from workplace organization, to process optimization and everything in between. Because Kaizen events are resource intensive, usually pulling people from their ordinary work for three to five days, it is essential to get the most out of every one. We’ve had lots of i...

Strategy Deployment is a hot topic in continuous improvement circles these days. We’re delighted to see that because effective strategy deployment can make the difference between reaching the goals of the organization in the expected time frame and failing to achieve the breakthrough objectives. Of course, strategy deployment isn’t easy and few companies really excel at the practice. Strategy depl...

A post by Jeff Roussel, read by Mark Graban Every time we walk into a facility and see a Kaizen board, we are reminded about the excitement and sense of anticipation that most teams have when the Kaizen board is first introduced. But very often, when we ask front line employees about them the response is tepid at best. There may still be huddle meetings where the progress of each improvement is di...

When I sat down to write about sustaining innovations, the word that popped into my mind was “entropy.” While entropy is a scientific term related to the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity, it is also used to refer to a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder. Entropy is a very real thing in organizations. Practices a...

A common mistake companies make when rolling out a new culture of continuous improvement is to fail to provide leadership training to the people leading it. When you're responsible for leading a cultural transformation, there are a lot of unique leadership skills that you need to employ. You need to be firm and empathetic, have high but reasonable expectations, communicate effectively, be present...