Customer Story: How Employees are Using KaiNexus at Array Architects
KaiNexus customer Jonathan Bykowski, Principal and Practice Area Leader, Continuous Improvement for Array Architects, discusses how employees are using KaiNexus in creative ways to capture, implement, measure, and share improvements.
In this video, Jonathan says...
Right now at Array we have a pretty wide variety of improvement work going on. Any change is good change, and we’re happy to take any opportunity to study something that one of our staff members brings forward to us, or that one of our senior leaders deems to be a key opportunity for perhaps a rapid change or rapid improvement.
Right now we have two examples I like to give because I think they show the variety of change that’s happening, as well as the idea that any change is good change.
We recently moved into a new headquarters and as part of our firms ongoing commitment to sustainability, we used it as an opportunity to get rid of all of our disposable dishware in our pantry and our bistro, so as part of our effort to make sure that there was no difficulty in that transition, we installed two dishwashers in our new space and thought we had set up a very simple process – one clean, one dirty. It turned out that that wasn’t quite so simple and that there was often confusion about which one was clean and which one was dirty.
One of our staff members submitted an opportunity for improvement (an OI) through KaiNexus – our virtual Kaizen board – and pretty rapidly our industrial engineer and our graphic designer got together, decided they could repurpose a pair of magnetic nametags that we use for our interviews, and make a quick and dirty and clean on brand magnet, and *poof* solved the problem. That was our Just Do It that I think took us all of about an hour to fix.
At the same time, we had another staff member submit a suggestion that perhaps we weren’t being as rigorous as we could be with our annual employee review process. Our employees are our greatest resource, and really our only true resource. We’re a company of thought leaders and we provide a knowledge-based service, so our staff is our most important asset. And to think that perhaps we weren’t getting the best value we could out of a resource management or employee review process was obviously a huge gap that we realized we needed to fill immediately.
So we created a cross disciplinary team that represented upstream and downstream customers and stakeholders and, over a period of several months, completely reinvented the way that we handle employee reviews, and created a much more robust process that is bidirectional and continuous throughout the year, and doesn’t rely on the notion of a once-a-year annual checkpoint.
Those are two examples of the pretty diverse continuum of improvement work, all of which is being managed under our continuous improvement initiative and tracked and available to everyone on our KaiNexus board.
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