During one of our recent KaiNexus Training Team Office Hours webinars, we took a deep dive into Boards in KaiNexus. You can watch it here. For those of you who prefer to read rather than watch, this post summarizes the information. Either way, this is an important introduction to one of the most valuable features of KaiNexus.

One of my favorite parts of KaiNexus is the charts feature. Charts let you record all the important data you need to track current states, the effect of your improvements, or anything else you can imagine.

We have customers who have more than 700 charts currently in KaiNexus, and they’re adding more every day. That’s a LOT of data spread throughout hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of Improvements, so wouldn’t it be great if you could peruse all that information in one place?

Well, thanks to the new charts section, you can!

From the charts section (accessible from the left navigation bar), you can open any chart in the system (except for private ones for which you do not have permission to access) and see any comments, files, links, locations, or people associated with it.

Cycle time is an important metric to understand because the impact of slower cycle time is often felt on employees’ motivation and their belief that submitted ideas will be implemented promptly - or at all.

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.

We know that you're all busy, and if our technology is hard to use, no one will want to. That's why we pride ourselves on having such an intuitive improvement software platform. It doesn’t take much training for people to get the hang of the system’s basics, but we’re sure that even our super-users have missed a few awesome features. The following advanced tips and tricks go beyond the basics to help you truly master KaiNexus.

You might have seen this blog post that explained why we devote ridiculous amounts of manpower to talking with our customers. Lots of great ideas come out of those talks. In fact, 87% of the improvements in our last couple of releases came directly from our customers’ ideas!

Tania Lyon is the Director of Organization Performance Improvement at St. Clair Hospital in Pittsburgh and a KaiNexus customer. She has taken full advantage of the KaiNexus platform and today we will share a guest post that she wrote about the use of Boards at St. Clair Hospital.

KaiNexus boards are an important part of our continuous improvement effort at St. Clair. With only two staff members dedicated to continuous improvement in a hospital of 2,400 employees, we need transparency to help us identify where our coaching is most needed. Our KaiNexus boards help us prioritize who to work with and when, sort of similar to how the squeaky wheel gets the grease. They also help us know where and when to “coach the coaches” as we work to embed lean management principles into our leadership team.

We’re always talking about how awesome KaiNexus Boards are, but a lot of people don’t realize just how helpful they can be!

These electronic Boards can:

• Enable greater collaboration
• Preserve the same layouts as your old physical boards
• Increase engagement
• House long-term knowledge
• Keep executives in the loop
• Improve meetings
• Provide remote access 

We’ve compiled this list of 9 Boards that we think you might find useful:

Every time you log into KaiNexus, the first thing you see is one of your Boards. Boards are filled with customizable Cards that display any kind of information you could want - from charts showing your KPIs to filtered list of Improvements.

If you’ve ever logged onto KaiNexus, you’ve probably seen a message like this. We use login notices to tell all our users about important updates and additions to the system.

But we’re not the only ones who can use this tool - every System Administrator can create custom notifications to be displayed to every user upon logging in.