KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

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 forget that this IS a cycle. We write it in a linear fashion because that is the way our language operates. P stands for plan, right? But stop and think about it. Is “plan” a noun or a verb? Is it A plan, or TO plan? Understanding this nuanced difference makes all the difference in understanding the cycle.

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 weapons, which would easily carry his army to victory if he took a moment to think about it. This cartoon is funny because of the parallel between this situation, and one that we often come up against in sales. People are often so busy fighting fires that they’re unable to take a step back and find a solution for the root cause of those fires.

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 of processes and activities that do not add value absolutely have a place in an educational environment. In higher education, there is an interesting coalition of students, faculty, administrators, public officials and potential employers that all have a stake in achieving the best possible outcomes.

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 Roussel, Vice-President of Sales for KaiNexus, hosted a webinar wherein Graban shared some of his experience and knowledge about Strategy Deployment. You can watch that full webinar, titled Everything You Need to Know About Strategy Deployment, here: https://info.kainexus.com/continuous-improvement/webinar/strategy-deployment/everything-you-need-to-know

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 waste, or customer complaints. Preventative actions may be applied to potential safety risks, competitive threats, or falling performance indicators. CAPA software has been developed to help organizations support this management technique. Here are the key advantages it offers.

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 it’s a foreign concept for so many people. Enter KaiNexus. The first three steps in most of my customer engagements are pretty standard and go something like this:

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 the digital approach can smooth the process and amplify the results.

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 can take many forms. For example, some organizations have different colored uniforms for different teams, others use visual cues to mark where tools should be placed when not in use.

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 to major success. Each cycle builds on the work done during the last and suddenly that mountain doesn’t seem so hard to climb.

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 When to stop overreacting to individual data points and improve the overall system, instead How to integrate this into your use of KaiNexus or for charts you create in Excel