If you’ve been using KaiNexus for a while, you’ve probably already discovered the advantages of creating Cards that display Improvements and Projects of certain statuses in your area so that you can track work being done under you, or of creating Cards that show Improvements and Projects caught in the different bottlenecks so that you can make sure work you’re supervising isn’t getting hung up anywhere.

But have you ever considered creating a Card that filters out Improvements and Projects containing certain keywords?

This is a great way of catching ideas throughout the organization that relate to a topic in which you’re interested - or that you want others to stay aware of.

Why would I want to filter by keyword?

Suppose you have a committee focused on one issue - let’s say, accident prevention. This committee is interested in accident prevention throughout your organization, not just in one area. How easy would it be for work involving accident prevention to slip past this team? I’d bet that it would be pretty easy, and has probably already happened!

What’s the harm in that? Well…

• The Responsible Person of such an Improvement might be stuck reinventing the wheel. The accident prevention committee might already have a solution for this issue, but they have no way of knowing they should reach out to the Responsible Person and let them know. This is a waste of the Responsible Person’s time, and that’s not very Lean.
  
  
• If the committee doesn’t already have a solution, they might be missing out on a great idea from the Responsible Person. That means that if this problem arises somewhere else, the prevention committee will be the ones spending time unnecessarily, trying to come up with a solution someone else already found.
  
  
• There might already be a solution to this problem, and that solution might be the standard. That means that the Author - who submitted the Improvement in the first place - might need some coaching to make sure they understand how things should actually be done. If the accident prevention committee is left out of the loop, the Author might never get the coaching they need.

How can I filter by keyword?

You can filter any list of Projects or Improvements in KaiNexus by keyword. We recommend creating a Card so that the right people will see items of interest as soon as they log into the system.

It’s not hard to make such a Card:

1. Click “Add” and choose “Improvement List” (or “Project List,” if you want to filter a list of Projects instead of Improvements).
   
   
2. Open the “Advanced” options.
   
   
3. Enter the keyword by which you want to filter the list to the “Keyword” field and add any other filters you want to include to the appropriate fields.
   
   The accident prevention committee from the example above might want to filter by the keyword “Accident.” That will catch any Improvements (or Projects, if you’re creating a Project List Card) containing the word “Accident.”

Is anyone using this feature? What kinds of keywords are you filtering for? Leave a comment and tell us about it!