We love our customers at KaiNexus. We admire people who are driving a culture of continuous improvement in their organizations, and we especially respect people who are willing to share lessons learned.

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. Click here to register.

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.”

Listen to our discussion (subscribe to our podcast):

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.

I asked him what it means for his company to have a “lean transformation.” Matthew said it started when they noticed a trend of “lean construction” amongst their customers, as a method for improved project delivery. One of their projects was “turned around” due to lean principles, so that “piqued their interest” about the approach, more generally.

As they learned more and developed a deeper understanding of what lean projects, lean management, and lean culture meant, they saw an opportunity to deploy lean management methods to be a better partner for their customers.

In 2013, J.C. Cannistraro instituted a continuous improvement program, based on lean principles, to start that transformation. He’ll share more about this in the webinar. As they learned more about lean, they saw an opportunity to leverage pre-existing cultural examples (they have always placed a strong emphasis on their people) to be more competitive in their industry.

They saw bottom-up continuous improvement as a way to leverage the drive and creativity of their smart and talented workforce, to continually engage them in a more meaningful way. “Continuous improvement was a way to release some creative energy that we weren’t tapping into,” Matthew said.

He reflected on how they rolled out continuous improvement a few times. Each time, there was a flood of ideas, which was tempered by management’s ability to respond. Doing this again with KaiNexus has prevented the “flattening out” they had seen before after the initial flood. Having a platform like KaiNexus helps them keep up the momentum.

I asked Matthew to make the case for why people should tune into the webinar. He says he wants to share their methodology for how they have deployed and used KaiNexus. How can we get beyond lean as a buzzword and touch on some of the concrete principles of lean that guided them in this process?

Hear more about Matthew’s work and his company’s culture in the webinar on February 23. We hope you’ll join us! If you attend live, you can ask questions that we’ll address, or you can always watch the recording afterward.

The Intersection of Culture and Technology: Capturing Improvement Where it Happens

February 23 from 1:00 - 2:00 pm ET

In this webinar, you will learn:

• Background of JC Cannistraro and the factors that led to the need for improvement software
  
• The importance of and methods for capturing improvement where it happens
  
• Examples of bottom-up improvement that you can learn from
• The role of technology in spreading bottom-up improvement
• Actionable advice for launching improvement software in your own organization