KaiNexus: Continuous Improvement, Leadership, and More

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 with their team and to get vital feedback. But could the approach be used to help employees who are not managers get a better understanding of the overall flow of value through the organization and where their work fits in? We believe that it can.

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 with Matthew the other day and we captured it as a podcast to preview his webinar titled “The Intersection of Culture and Technology: Capturing Improvement Where it Happens.” In our discussion, he starts by introducing himself and his company, a family-owned mechanical contracting company, based in Boston. He was exposed to KaiNexus when they were doing some 5S improvement work and discovered they needed a platform to help track their ideas and progress.

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 industry with each project being unlike the last. That is why agile thinking, effective communications, and extensive collaboration are necessary to maximize value.

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 applaud any attempt to get front-line employees involved in improvement, but our clients have told us that electronic suggestion boxes are not an effective way to capitalize on the collective wisdom of the team. Why? Largely because they do not go far enough in turning thought into action. Here is where they break down.

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 not always practical. What should we do? What are the effective cost control and reduction mechanisms?

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 Daniel T. Jones, founder and Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy in the U.K penned the influential work, Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation in 1996. Although much of the material they cover is not new, they present it with a unique structure that rests on five core principles of Lean manufacturing. Although their focus is on the manufacturing sector, these principles can be put to work in other industries including healthcare, construction, higher education and software development.

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