Getting Started with KaiNexus at Array Architects
KaiNexus customer Jonathan Bykowski, Principal and Practice Area Leader, Continuous Improvement for Array Architects, discusses how KaiNexus fits into the organization's approach to continuous improvement and innovation.
In this video, Jonathan says...
As our continuous improvement initiative was gaining traction and starting to involve folks from around the firm, we wanted to very simply create some sort of a Kaizen board. We wanted one place where people could go to see all of the improvement that was happening around the firm, where they could make suggestions, and where they could offer input.
Transparency is one of our fundamental tenants to improvement. In order to really drive culture change, we wanted everyone to see what was happening and we wanted to be fully transparent about all of our improvement, no matter how strategic or business-metric focused it happened to be. But we operate in seven offices around the country, and I’m a huge fan of simple solutions when a simple solution will work.
I much prefer simple over sexy if the “simple” is not going to become a barrier. The fanciest technology on the planet looks really slick, but if it causes people to not use something because it’s too hard to figure out how to turn it on or remember their password, then it doesn’t do us any good. But as much as I wanted a simple whiteboard with some magnets and an eraser, we just couldn’t manage that across seven offices.
So we looked for a digital version of the Kaizen board, and we found a platform called KaiNexus that actually wound up, in the end, offering us a full series of things we didn’t realize we needed until we started our work.
Through the KaiNexus platform, folks are able to see what’s going on anywhere in the firm. It acts not only as a virtual Kaizen board, but also as a really robust project management tool. It hadn’t occurred to us when we started this that, if we were successful and lots of people started submitting opportunities for improvement and working on ideas for process change, we were suddenly going to have to track and manage all that process change; we were going to need a place to store the information and content that was generated, and a way for people that weren’t directly involved with the project to track its evolution.
Shared drives and network folders and documents with terrible file names are all not good ways to work, and KaiNexus, because it’s a cloud based solution offers us a way to achieve and overcome all of that in one very elegant and intuitive platform. It’s easy to use, it’s not complicated, and I knew that we were on the right path when our COO – who is no spring chicken – was working on an improvement project and I asked him to send us a copy of the outline for the training program he’d been tasked with creating.
He very wryly replied that I would find it where it belonged: posted on KaiNexus. So, touché, George. It’s easy enough for George to use it, and if George can use it, anybody can.
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