Lean process management is a method for building a company culture that supports continuous improvement. It involves a long-term approach to daily work that encourages small, incremental changes in process operations to improve quality and efficiency.

The primary objective of Lean process improvement is to create value for the customer by optimizing resources and creating an uninterrupted workflow based on near real-time customer demands. In addition, the approach seeks to minimize or eliminate all waste of resources, effort, and time by documenting each step in a business process and then removing or reducing steps that do not create customer value. The concept of Lean is rooted in manufacturing, but it has been adapted to fit almost every industry.

Quality management programs are often associated with large organizations, such as automotive manufacturing or large healthcare systems. These organizations often have teams dedicated to quality control, and they may leverage specific business process methodologies such as Lean or Six Sigma. While that level of sophistication may not be possible or even necessary for your business, there are still many continuous quality improvement tools that are easy to implement and can have an enormous impact on your organization, no matter its size.

Some of the following tools have been borrowed from Total Quality Management, Lean, and the Toyota production system. Still, they can be used independently of these methodologies to accelerate improvement in any organization.

Transforming corporate culture is not a small undertaking. There are usually both tangible and intangible costs. When done effectively, the long-term advantages far outweigh the costs of living with a culture that isn't thriving, but how do you measure the impact of such a change? After all, much of what constitutes corporate culture is intangible. 

For that reason, the goal isn't really to measure the culture but rather to measure the outcomes that are impacted by the culture. This is much more practicable and useful because these results directly affect the value of the organization. Of course, the exact metrics you measure will depend on the goal of your culture change effort. However, with the right tools in place and thoughtful planning, you'll be able to demonstrate the real-world benefits your culture initiative achieves.

In this blog post, we'd like to share two recent episodes from our KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Podcast.

Are you struggling to drive a continuous improvement culture in your organization?

Do you need to revive a CI culture that has lost momentum? 

If you’re like so many others, it can be difficult to know which questions to ask, and where to start.

Jeff Roussel, chief revenue officer of KaiNexus and a true continuous improvement leader and believer, recently joined Allison Greco, founder of Continuous Improvement International, to talk about how you can build a continuous improvement culture. To watch a full recap, click here.

KaiNexus customers capture more daily improvements from staff, run more efficient strategic projects and events, coach more effectively, and streamline their improvement process. They engage everyone from the frontlines to the executive leaders in a thriving improvement culture to accelerate their rate of change—and it shows. The more engaged your employees are with improvement work, the more impact you’ll see.

With KaiNexus, organizations receive anywhere from 2-10x the number of ideas from their employees, and the average idea in KaiNexus is worth $15,000. Most customers also pay back their entire investment in KaiNexus by implementing one idea—now, who wouldn’t want that?

Let’s take a detailed look at how your organization can drive ROI with KaiNexus:

Imagine going on a family road trip but not bringing your family. Do some people stay behind so they can experience the trip through the photos you send them? I’m willing to bet that more often than not, you bring the whole family. After all, it’s a lot more fun for you - and for them - to share in the joy together!

The same concept applies to continuous improvement and why everyone needs to be a part of the improvement system.

When you’re on the hunt for a platform that can facilitate your improvement culture, it can be tempting to limit the rollout to a handful of improvement experts and managers rather than engaging the masses. Whether you’re making this choice to save money, to keep things simple, or because you don’t think everyone will engage anyway, it’s a mistake to leave people behind.

Here are a few reasons why you don’t want to go down that route:

The principles of Lean and continuous improvement methodologies originated from manufacturing, but there’s no doubt that they have been applied to other industries quite successfully, such as nuclear energy. The nuclear industry believes that there is no defect or opportunity that is too small to go after, and there’s always room for improvement. This important principle is a cornerstone belief of what many refer to as a High-Reliability Organization or HRO. 

With the blistering speed of this summer’s news cycle, we can’t blame you if you’ve already forgotten about the single largest security incident in Twitter’s history that took place on July 15 but was a doozy. It was also a teachable moment for Twitter and every other organization that involves people and technology. 

What Happened?

Early in the day on July 15, 2020, Twitter’s automated detection systems flagged some suspicious activity. Several Twitter accounts with short handles, like @USA, @drug, @love, and others, seemed to be compromised. These short handles are valued among certain hacker communities, so Twitter knows to keep an eye out for unusual access. The appropriate people were notified, and they began looking into the issue. Security incidents like this are common when you have a platform with hundreds of millions of users.

Recognizing and rewarding employees on their efforts is a critical component of a continuous improvement culture. Without recognition, it’s typically challenging to drive employee engagement. Your employees need you to recognize the work and contributions they make, and as a result of recognition, they’ll continue to produce work that both you and them are proud of.  The recognition program can range from something as simple as thanking them for their work, or you can have a more formal program like Employee of the Month.

The team at Rockwater put together a program to encourage KaiNexus participation and drive overall continuous improvement engagement. Here’s more detail on the participation and bonus program they created.