Vic Minhas, Sr. Director, Continuous Improvement at Trinity Industries, shares his experience in managing improvement through KaiNexus at KaiNexicon this year. 

Since 2015, Vic Minhas has been leading Trinity Industries' continuous improvement (CI) journey towards excellence. In this role, he is focused on using an intrinsic approach to develop a long-lasting CI culture for Trinity.

Read the re-cap of Vic’s presentation below, or watch the recorded presentation: 

How many thoughts do you think people have in a day? 100? 500? 1,000? Try 6,000! 

These some 6,000 thoughts per day are what lead to ideas - but without taking action, these ideas will never come to life. Only about 6% of ideas actually get implemented - so a majority of ideas essentially go in the trash!

At Trinity, they sought to avoid falling into this grueling statistic by implementing a way to capture and implement more ideas throughout their organization. While attending a conference, they had the opportunity to visit Costco - and noticed something eye-catching. It was an Idea Board in the middle of their shop floor called ‘Improvements Through Employee Engagement.’ These Ideas were submitted by employees specifically meant to improve safety, quality, or reduce waste. 

As soon as they returned from the conference, they created a similar Idea Board - ready to gain new Ideas. But unfortunately, they didn’t have much luck getting anyone to use it. They gathered just 4 ideas in 12 months. 

They knew something had to change, and that is when Trinity’s partnership with KaiNexus began. They transformed their unused Idea Board into a digital platform in order to better capture and track ideas. After just 6 months of using KaiNexus, their team went from 4 ideas - to 653 ideas! 

How Everyone in the Organization uses KaiNexus

Vic explains the three levels of Trinity’s manufacturing organization: 

• Shop Floor (Front Line Workers)

• Front Line (Plant Managers, Front Line Leadership) 

• Top Line (Executives)

KaiNexus is used differently based on the goals and responsibilities of each 'level'. 

All Shop Floor employee ideas can be found on a Kanban Board, as a way to see the status of your idea and who is assigned to it. This way after an employee submits an idea, this Kanban Board employees the opportunity to visually see their Idea through each stage. 

As for the Front Line Leaders, they spend a lot of time working on A3s. They utilize the KaiNexus mobile app to get their A3’s done effectively. These projects live on another Kanban Board. This is a great visualization to show Executives or other Leaders the status of these projects. 

Top Line Executives previously used X-Matrix for strategy deployment. But they struggled with the overwhelming format of the data, and the way you must move your head back and forth to see all the data. They decided to work with the KaiNexus team to come up with another way to visualize this data. They created an X Matrix in the form of a Strategy Waterfall, as a way to simplify the data visualization. Now with a more appealing format, Executives can easily review important data.

In closing, Vic emphasized the power KaiNexus has had in building and maintaining a Continuous Improvement culture, and the importance of setting up KaiNexus uniquely for each 'level' of your organization.