In 2020, Iluka Resources, a $2B Australian critical minerals company, created a continuous improvement program to engage their frontline staff and give them the opportunity to further enhance their work. However, they encountered significant challenges, including difficulty capturing the impact of improvements and managing tasks collaboratively across teams.

Why KaiNexus?

Iluka brought on KaiNexus as its improvement platform for the company’s 1,000+ users to manage their improvements and celebrate quick wins. A few important reasons they chose KaiNexus were the customizable user experience, ease of use, collaboration capabilities, and ability to track and capture key metrics. 

Strategy for Rolling Out

The Iluka CI team is a small but mighty team, which made it extremely important for them to be strategic in rolling out KaiNexus to 1,000+ users. They decided on rolling out KaiNexus site-by-site, ensuring each department received the support and focus needed for successful adoption. The team set clear success benchmarks and conducted weekly leadership meetings to review progress, address roadblocks, and keep improvements on track.

Key to Iluka’s success was having a dedicated site champion in each department, typically a senior leader who was passionate about CI work. These champions are responsible for leading weekly meetings and collaborating with other site leaders to sustain engagement and focus on improvement efforts.

Results

Since becoming a KaiNexus customer, Iluka has captured over 3,000 opportunities for improvement, demonstrating strong buy-in from across the organization with an average engagement rate of 73%. 

“One of Iluka’s continuous improvement design principles is a light resourcing of full-time improvement specialists, with strong ownership of the process in the operations. This required a platform that has a good user experience and is self-explanatory even for novice users. KaiNexus allowed us the freedom to customize it to our needs while being feature-rich when it comes to portfolio management and capture of outcomes.” 

- Chris Schmid, Innovation & Improvement Manager