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A physician orders a two-view foot x-ray. The images come back, a third view turns out to be necessary, so the physician orders it and moves on. A few minutes lost, a patient waiting longer, radiology doing work twice. On a busy day, nobody calls that a problem.
It becomes a problem when it happens again the next week, with a different physician and a different patient.
Continuous improvement is mostly this. Not the transformational project, but the small things that interrupt work or get in the way of what the customer needs, noticed and fixed by the people closest to them.
Small problems get ignored because each one is easy to work around. Ordering the extra view takes less time than reporting the fact that it keeps happening.
The real cost is not one interruption. It is one interruption times how often it recurs times how many people run into it.
Some arithmetic, not a case study: a two-minute workaround that happens twice a week for thirty people costs more than 100 hours a year. Nobody feels those hours, because they never arrive in a block big enough to notice. They show up instead as a department that always seems a little behind.
The workaround is also invisible. Until someone writes it down, the only person who knows about it is the person absorbing it.
The foot x-ray example above came from an opportunity for improvement entered in KaiNexus. Patients were sometimes getting a two-view x-ray when three views were needed. Before the problem was visible, the fix was individual: the physician ordered the third view and got on with the day. That resolved one case and left the pattern intact.
At a semiconductor customer, someone submitted an idea to change the order in which fields were entered on an online invoice. It looked minor. It produced more accurate invoices and cut a meaningful amount of rework. [VERIFY: the original transcript says "countless hours." Recommend either a real figure or the softer wording used here.]
Neither problem was a technology problem. Both traced back to inconsistent orientation for new staff. That is a fixable thing, and fixing it protects every future order and every future invoice.
Ordering the third view handles today. Making sure the correct order is placed the first time handles it for everyone, permanently.
Most organizations are very good at the first one. People are rewarded, informally, for being the person who quietly makes things work. Prevention requires the problem to become visible to someone other than the person absorbing it.
The most common reason small problems go unreported is that people believe reporting one means owning the fix. If they don't know the root cause, they stay quiet.
That expectation is worth removing. When an issue is entered in KaiNexus without a known cause or solution, it becomes visible to people who may know something the submitter doesn't. Colleagues add context, a supervisor recognizes a pattern from another shift, and the conversation often surfaces related problems that nobody had connected before.
Improvement tends to generate more improvement. The first entry is usually the hard one.
Ask a narrower question. "What slowed you down yesterday?" gets far more than "Any ideas?"
Respond quickly to small items. Speed of response teaches people more about whether reporting is worthwhile than any launch campaign does.
Accept problems without solutions attached. Requiring a solution filters out exactly the problems whose causes aren't obvious.
Close the loop where people can see it. When someone watches a two-minute annoyance disappear because a coworker mentioned it, the next report costs nothing to get.
KaiNexus gives people a place to raise small problems, and gives leaders visibility into the patterns behind them.
Hi, I'm Mark Graban from KaiNexus, where we make improvement happen.
Practicing continuous improvement every day means finding the small problems that interfere with our work or with what our customers need. Often we hit a really small problem, something that interrupts or delays us for a minute, and we move on. It doesn't seem like a big deal.
But if it's a recurring problem, the kind of fire we're always fighting, then fixing it pays off many times over. Every day in the future, multiplied by all of our coworkers who face the same thing.
One opportunity for improvement entered in KaiNexus involved ordering foot x-rays. Patients were sometimes getting a two-view x-ray instead of a three-view. In a world before KaiNexus, the physician would get the two-view results, order the third view, and move on. That means a delay for the patient and extra work for radiology.
Another example came from one of our semiconductor customers. A simple opportunity for improvement recommended changing the order in which fields were entered on their online invoices. That change led to more accurate invoices and saved hours of rework.
The question worth asking is what we can do to improve the process so we prevent the problem. In these cases, that means making sure the third view is ordered correctly and the invoice is entered properly. Getting it right the first time.
Things like this often aren't even seen as problems. But when one is entered in KaiNexus, even without a known root cause or solution, it becomes visible and people can work together on it.
Neither of these was a technology problem. The x-rays and the invoices were sometimes entered wrong because orientation for new staff was inconsistent, and that's something we can improve.
The discussion usually turns up additional problems and root causes beyond the one that started it. Improvement leads to more improvement. Instead of just dealing with issues as they come, people are using KaiNexus to address root causes and prevent future problems.
Watch more videos from the KaiNexus Education Video series.
Blog Post: The Value of Logging Small Ideas In Improvement Tracking Software
Blog Post: Three Reasons To Give Incremental Improvement A Try
Blog Post: Standard Work – Can Your Business Afford Anything Less?
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