These days just about everything is online and connected. I got a new emersion circulator to make sous vied meals; it’s controlled by an app on my phone. That’s awesome. It’s no wonder that HR leaders in almost every industry are looking for ways to move previously analog tasks into the digital age. The employee suggestion box is no exception. There are a bunch of ways to put it online from software built for that purpose to anonymous surveys and submission forms. But does it help? Does moving the suggestion box to the cloud result in better ideas? Do employees feel more heard?

For the leaders we’ve spoken with, the answer is no. Removing the steps of walking to a box, jotting down the suggestion, and dropping it in often does result in more suggestions initially. Requiring specific fields to be completed can increase the quality of the recommendations in the beginning, but the improvements are generally short-lived. People soon begin to ignore the link or icon, just like they ignored the physical box.

DMAIC is a widely used structured process improvement technique developed at Motorola in the 1980s. It is popular among organizations that use the Lean manufacturing or Six Sigma business methodologies but is also used as a stand-alone continuous improvement tool. It helps teams tackle challenges by finding root causes and applying thoughtful fixes. DMAIC ensures that change is well documented, managed, and successful.

Improvement software is not required to complete a DMAIC process, but there are smart reasons for making it part of your organization’s approach. Technology can help speed up the DMAIC process, it helps to measure the results, and it creates your organization’s repository of knowledge. In fact, software has a role to play during each stage of the DMAIC process. Here’s how it works.

For many years, the continuous improvement philosophy of Kaizen was most closely associated with industrial manufacturing and high technology. That’s because it was developed by the Japanese auto industry and then later adopted by technology companies like GE and Motorola.

But if you’ve been hearing about Kaizen program management in other sectors over the last few years, you are not alone.

The principals of Kaizen apply to almost every industry and are now widespread in healthcare, construction, software development, education, logistics, and everything in between.

We can’t teach you everything you need to know in one blog post, but we can lay out the fundamentals of Kaizen program management and offer further reading recommendations.

We get the chance to chat with lots of people who have concluded that a Kaizen software solution will help them get the most out of their continuous improvement efforts. But most people have never sought such a solution before, and they are unsure how to convince the rest of the organization that it is time to move forward.

To help, we’ve put together some tips on how to convince the team that investing in a software solution for Kaizen will result in positive returns, demonstrate that you know what to look for, and give everyone confidence that implementation will be successful.

Dr. Ethan Burris is a Professor of Management and the Chevron Centennial Fellow at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the Director of the Center of Leadership Excellence for the McCombs School. He earned his Ph.D. in Management from Cornell University and has served as a Visiting Scholar at Google and Microsoft. He teaches and consults on topics relating to leadership, managing power and politics, leading groups and teams, and negotiations.

Dr. Burris’ current research focuses on understanding 1) the antecedents and consequences of employees speaking up or staying silent in organizations, 2) leadership behaviors, processes and outcomes, and 3) the effective management of conflict generated by multiple interests and perspectives. In particular, he has investigated how leaders shape employees’ decisions whether to speak up or stay silent and how leaders evaluate those who speak up.

We were pleased to have him join us at our annual user conference in Austin last year. This post is a recap of his presentation; we highly recommend that you watch it to learn more about the science behind which ideas for improvement are more likely to get promoted by managers.

Howard Earl Gardner is an American developmental psychologist and the former John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He has written hundreds of research articles and more than thirty books that have been translated into multiple languages. He is best recognized for his theory of multiple intelligences, which he explained in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. He argues that people process information differently, and therefore, there are many ways that people learn and process information.

One type of intelligence that Gardner studied is spatial intelligence, which is the ability to gain understanding from pictures or other visuals. While everyone benefits from a different mix of the more than seven types of intelligence, most people tend to respond to visuals because they offer a concrete way to organize abstract information.

Total Quality Management (abbreviated as TQM) as it is practiced today was developed by Dr. William Deming, a famed management consultant whose work helped transform Japanese manufacturing after World War II.

Although TQM has a lot in common with the Six Sigma methodology, they are not the same. Total Quality Management is focused on ensuring that process standards ensure a great customer experience, while Six Sigma is designed to reduce defects. The practice of TQM is about holding all parties involved in the production process accountable for the quality of the final product or service.

Let’s look at how.

Kanban boards are excellent visual management tools for tracking work-in-progress, identifying roadblocks, and ensuring a free-flowing value stream. The idea started with inventory cards helping workers at Toyota ensure that the right parts were available just in time. Leaders took the concept and used it to track any type of work, often on a poster or whiteboard. These days, you’ll find them in hospitals, software firms, construction offices, schools, and more.

We talk a lot about the mechanics of business process improvement and the technology to support it on this blog. Today, we thought we’d share some real-world examples of process improvements that made a difference to critical performance metrics.

They come from a wide array of industries and target vastly different problems. What they have in common is that someone recognized an opportunity for improvement, found the root cause, and implemented a fix.

To top it off, none of these improvements cost a dime.

You probably don’t have these specific challenges, but these business process improvement examples might get you thinking in a new way about the ones you do face.

When we ask people about innovation, they usually leap to radical breakthroughs like self-driving cars, alternative energy sources, or space colonies. While these things are innovative, the term innovation simply means a change to an established method or idea. Storing your forks closer to the dishwasher is innovation. In companies, incremental changes like optimizing a process, or solving a long-standing problem can be as necessary for success as introducing a new product or selling to a new market.