There’s a passage in Louis Carol’s, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” that I find quite profound. Below, Alice is chatting with the Cheshire Cat.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where,” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

That's a pretty smart Cat. It is amazing how often, however, that people do something just because it seems like the thing to do, without ever thinking about the final desired impact. Sadly, this is the situation with continuous improvement programs in some organizations.

KaiNexus customers reject this approach and instead seek to set real objectives and measure the impact, quantitatively or qualitatively, of every single opportunity for improvement that is resolved. Our solution supports this with comprehensive continuous improvement impact reports. It’s like having a GPS for your improvement efforts. You always know where you are, and where you are headed - and why.

Centralized, Data-driven Analysis

Our solution gives customers a single format for impact reporting on improvement activities across the entire organization. It penetrates every level including simple suggestions from front-line employees, and major top-down projects, like Kaizen events and value stream mapping.

When opportunities for improvement are resolved, KaiNexus captures the results in several key areas including:

• Quality
• Safety
• Cost Savings
• Revenue Generation
• Time Savings
• Customer Satisfaction

This provides the basis for an apples-to-apples comparison so that standard metrics can be applied to the improvement and innovation efforts across different departments, teams, locations, and divisions. While the details of each improvement effort can be structured uniquely for the problem at hand, the impact reporting is normalized and standardized for accurate measurement across many types of improvements. Our customers can customize this standardized approach to meet their needs, for example, talking about patients instead of clients.

Engagement Barometer

In addition to wanting to understand the impact of each improvement, KaiNexus customers also want to be able to measure the momentum of their continuous improvement and innovation initiative. Understanding trends related to the number of opportunities for improvement being collected over time and the number of employees who are actively engaged in improvement, helps KaiNexus customers evaluate the effectiveness of their improvement culture.

KaiNexus makes it easy to see the growth of engagement and opportunities over time. Leaders can evaluate the trends over the last month, quarter, or year. Customers can examine this data related to specific areas if they want to hone in on one group, or even a particular individual.

Because KaiNexus customers can measure impact and engagement, they are able to set goals for each and track the progress toward those goals. They can easily calculate the ROI of improvement and justify their investment in the approach. If you find that attractive, we’d love to talk.