The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is an award given by the President of the United States. It was established in 1987 as part of an effort to make quality a national priority. Each year, three awards are given in each of five categories: service, education, healthcare, manufacturing, and small business.
Whether your approach to improvement is based on daily improvement (kaizen or PDSA), Rapid Improvement Events (a.k.a. “kaizen events”), or major projects, think of KaiNexus as the productivity network needed to support and sustain continuous improvement in every part of your organization throughout your Baldrige journey.
KaiNexus can help you achieve critical elements of each of the Baldrige criteria:
1. Leadership
KaiNexus provides a method of structured improvement management that can be utilized by your organization’s leaders to make continuous improvement a top priority.
- Transparency and Accountability
Our transparent system provides a measure of accountability for leadership and staff, in which employees are able to submit their Opportunities for Improvement, that are then passed on to leadership using active notifications.
- Growth of an Organization-Wide Continuous Improvement Model
When staff members attempt innovation and take intelligent risks, leadership must respond quickly to demonstrate that these efforts are valued to the organization. This fosters the growth of an organization-wide continuous improvement model. KaiNexus helps by providing a way for leaders and staff to communicate quickly and effectively, giving feedback and updates automatically and consistently.
- 360 Degree View of Improvement Activity
Using KaiNexus, leadership can easily track and monitor improvement activity with a 360-degree view of the entire organization’s efforts. Leaders can use KaiNexus to drill down to see the activity and results for any level or part of the organization.
2. Drive Action Toward Organizational Objectives
Leaders are able to create Events, Projects, and Challenges in KaiNexus. This allows them to focus the collective brain power of their staff on achieving specific organizational objectives, in addition to the “bottom up” opportunities identified by staff as daily continuous improvements.
Events, Projects, and Challenges can be issued to any group at any level, and the improvement work relating to them is housed in a single, central location. KaiNexus creates detailed, easy-to-read metrics that enable analysis of the results, covering a wide variety of improvements ranging from safety and satisfaction to cost and time savings.
3. Strategic Planning
KaiNexus can be used to deploy and track strategic initiatives across an organization by improving communication and transparency of action while continuously monitoring and reporting on results.
- Structured Improvement Management
KaiNexus provides a method of structured improvement management that unifies your organization's strategic planning efforts. Rather than prescribing a specific improvement methodology, we provide a model that is flexible enough to accommodate your existing needs and processes.
- Track The Progress of Strategic Initiatives
With KaiNexus, you have the ability to enter your organization’s strategic initiatives into the system and track the associated Opportunities for Improvement along with their results. KaiNexus helps you to see whether these initiatives are being properly addressed, and to recognize the work of the staff who are contributing to the organization’s strategic plan.
4. Customer and Market Focus
Customer care is of the utmost importance, but it can be difficult for an organization to know exactly what needs to improve in order to provide the best results. Often, it is the frontline staff who are best able to answer this question. The KaiNexus system empowers your employees to improve the organization to better meet the needs of your customers, resulting in continuously better products and services.
KaiNexus enables employees to quickly enter their Opportunities for Improvement into an easily accessible system. The process is designed to be fast and simple, so that there is no learning curve and work can continue uninterrupted.
5. Information and Analysis
In a rapidly changing business environment, knowledge management is critical to organizational success. KaiNexus enables the assembly of information used to develop Opportunities for Improvement that ensure the tracking and achievement of organizational objectives.
KaiNexus collects workforce knowledge and communicates best practices in a systematic manner across the organization. KaiNexus takes improvement to the next level by not only helping you to get improvement done, but also by recording and tracking the effects of your Opportunities for Improvements. When an Opportunity is completed in the system, staff selects what area (if any) was improved by the idea. This cumulative data is automatically sorted and easily accessed in easy-to-read visual metrics and reports that present the value of completed Opportunities. This allows leaders to see which individuals and teams are high-performing, and which need help.
6. Human Resource Focus
- Engaged Staff
We believe improvement can and should be a part of every person’s job. By involving each person in the organization, momentum builds and improvement becomes part of a patient- or customer-centered continuous improvement culture. Every member of your organization will have a unique login to KaiNexus that allows them to enter Opportunities for Improvement, collaborate in improvement work, and stay informed about the progress of your improvement efforts. KaiNexus keeps everybody in the loop throughout the entire improvement cycle.
- Institutional Body of Knowledge
KaiNexus creates an institutional body of knowledge for organizations by creating an easily-searchable database of completed Opportunities for Improvement, enabling staff to learn not only from personal experience and coworkers, but also from all former staff as well. When an Opportunity is recognized, workers can search the KaiNexus database and read the results of any related Opportunities, eliminating the need to repeatedly solve common problems.
- Process Management
Processes need to be continually evaluated and improved upon in order to reduce waste in the system. KaiNexus encourages everybody in your organization to identify these non-value added steps, unnecessary process variability, and duplicate processes. KaiNexus builds alignment across your organization by making connections between and reinforcing measures derived from your organization’s processes and strategy.
- Business Results
Continuous improvement programs, such as those facilitated by the KaiNexus improvement platform, offer a very compelling ROI. KaiNexus measures “hard” cost savings that flow immediately to your bottom line in terms of lower cost and higher revenue. KaiNexus also enables your entire organization to quickly implement improvements in quality, safety, time, staff satisfaction and patient/customer satisfaction.
.svg)
