Speaker 1: Hi, everyone. My name is Matt Banna. I work in strategic sales here at Kinexus. And really, that just means I get to help both existing and potential customers work to drive improvement at scale. Today, we're going to walk through a high level technical demonstration of the Kinexus platform. At the end of the presentation, I'll have a contact slide in case you'd like to reach out for more additional information. I'm really excited to walk you through Kinexus today. But before we jump into the product, it's important to know who we are and why we do what we do, as that influences our product and how we help our customers more than anything else. At Kinexus, we're a mission-driven organization. And our mission is to spread continuous improvement. We accomplish our mission through the design and development of a software platform that makes it easier to drive the right behaviors and manage improvement activity at scale. Our mission is echoed through everything that we do, from connecting customers to developing new features. We frequently ask ourselves, will that enhancement or direction help spread improvement? If not, it makes for a really easy decision. Creating a culture of continuous improvement requires your people or your leadership behaviors, your improvement processes, and your technology to be aligned. Kinexus acts as an enabling technology, helping leadership drive the correct behaviors and processes to flow effectively. Without an equal focus on all three parts, your organization will fall short in its goals. Our technology platform is designed as a system for both collaboration and reporting. When we say collaboration, we're talking about idea capture and problem solving, sending notifications and writing comments to each other, assigning tasks, and all the individual improvement activities taking place. When we talk reporting, we're focused on the status of that activity, who's engaged, who needs more coaching, where do you assign resources, and what's the quantitative and qualitative impact of the improvement activity. We often hear from organizations that they use multiple technologies to handle this entire scope of activity. In Kinexus, you can find all this information in one place, making it easier and more accessible for everyone. Our customers typically come to us to solve these technology challenges around improvement. And they often underestimate the impact that these challenges have on an organization's bottom line. Each of these challenges tie back to a larger business value. They often don't have the visibility into the work that's happening across a site, a business unit, or an entire organization. It makes it difficult to assign the right resources, know where the bottlenecks are, and how to prioritize work effectively. We often also hear that improvement activity isn't organized in one place. Information lives in different drives or a siloed in spreadsheets and applications, resulting in repeat work happening across multiple years. Or even we find that different teams are working on solving the same problems at the same time. Improvement activity in different places often means different standards, which makes it harder to teach problem solving at scale. And retraining needs to happen when moving from one business unit to another. We also see that organizations have difficulty capturing the impact of improvement projects and rolling that up across the entire enterprise. Without knowing the ROI of improvement, it becomes harder to get more resources to drive more improvement throughout the organization. Lastly, we've seen the organizations have trouble sharing best practices, replicating, and implementing these improvements across the enterprise. They often don't know who a new idea or a solution applies to, if it's been implemented, once identified, or what the impact was at each location. There can often be a massive ROI by finding those improvement activities that should apply to other places and being able to replicate those in the right spot. Kinexus is often seen as just a technology company. But the most undervalued aspects of a potential partner evaluation is not only finding the right solution to the current state problem, but ensuring that the partner has the capability to meet future needs and goals as well. For us, we feel like we're the right partner for our organizations for a couple of different aspects. The first is that CI is our mission. We're a mission-driven organization, which means that continuous improvement is at the forefront of all the business decisions that we make. This results in product enhancements and services specifically designed to support and scale improvement cultures, helping you grow as we do. Second, we invest in the enterprise. Improvement is hard, and improvement at scale in thousands of people is even harder. The Kinexus platform is designed to support the enterprise, and that requires a team that can make an enterprise deployment successful. From dedicated customer success managers to interfacing with Kinexpert solution engineers, lean strategists, support training, Kinexus executives, our team provides the expertise so your organization can focus on the improvement in the business. We also have a successful track record. There's a lot of numbers that are right here on the screen, but I think what's really the biggest and the most impactful is this 82% completion rate. 82% of the items that go into Kinexus result in some sort of positive impact to the organization, whether that's quality, safety, satisfaction, or dollar saved. This is a high benchmark and a great one to measure yourself against if you're looking to see how Kinexus customers are doing in comparison to your current state. Lastly, our configuration flexibility, probably our most valued and important aspect of our platform. It allows us to map your existing processes to minimize change management, and it allows us to adapt to future challenges and requirements that we see across our customer base. With the Kinexus configurability of the platform, we're purpose built to support all areas of improvement, but there's so much flexibility, we like to bucket our use cases into four categories. The employee driven is going to be your ideas and your problem solving, your issues driven from your front line. Your leader driven are going to be your domainics or big projects that are starting from leadership and driven down and directed to get worked on upon. Third, we have our strategy driven improvement. This encompasses your balance scorecards, your potion planning, your X matrix, and mapping all the activity to your organization's strategic direction and accomplishing long term goals. Lastly, we have our process driven improvement, and these are going to be your processes that drive improvement as a result of gimbal walks or audits or structured review processes or incident tracking or even certification classes that can be managed in the system. All of these use cases can be separate or seamlessly integrated together to provide one place for all of your improvement activity. We're about to dive into the system, but before we do that, I want to emphasize that everything you'll see today from the templates to workflows to boards and the network structure are simply examples. We work directly with each of our customers to map our software into their processes, both to help minimize the change management processes, but to give them the benefits of technology on those processes. Today, we're going to be focusing on idea submission. Feel free to check out other content on our website for more information on some of our other use cases, such as stage gate initiatives, project management, or strategy deployment. First, I'm going to start off here with a high level orientation of our system. Kinexus is a role based system, so not everybody has access to everything. Today, we're signed in as a user named Greg, and Greg is going to be more of a super user or a power user in the system. What that does mean, though, is that not everybody has access to everything. Not everybody has access to the admin menu or to build custom reporting or to do user management of the system or to even create their own dashboards. What everybody does get access to first is the notifications. These notifications are driven by the activity in the system and are activated in real time. So when a new idea is submitted or a project goes overdue or somebody writes a comment or assigns out a task, you'll get notified here. And then you can also get notified via email to help keep you in the loop about what's happening in the system. Next to that, everybody has access to the search functionality in Kinexus. I know we all know how search bars work. What's important to note is we also know how frustrating it is when you search through a system and you don't actually find what you're looking for. So we put a lot of work into making sure that when you utilize the search, you find the activity that you need inside Kinexus and have access to the knowledge repository that Kinexus becomes of all the improvement activity. Beneath that, we have what we call a board or a dashboard in Kinexus. Boards are made up of cards. And these cards can be completely dragged and dropped around and customized to fit an individual user's use case and their correct role in the system. Many of the cards show some sort of improvement activity, which are simply driven by filters. These can be very simple. Show me my project. Show me my overdue work. Show me the tasks assigned to me. But they can also be incredibly complex and powerful, showing things such as improvements that haven't been updated in more than two weeks, or new ideas that haven't been assigned out in two days, or projects that have been overdue for a certain period of time. These allows you to dive in and figure out where the bottlenecks are in your system to help keep things on track. There's also gamification and recognition function in Kinexus. Some of this may just be tracking the number of improvements or projects that people have been a part of or checking their notifications. Some might be participating in certain improvement activity or even tracking your green belts and yellow belts and black belt certifications to make sure that you're utilizing the right resources on the right projects. The last thing that everybody has access to is the ability to add new work into Kinexus. The type of work is going to be dependent on your role. And for here, Greg has the example of an improvement idea in A3 and a lean project. But again, these will all be configured to your specific use cases. There's multiple ways to be able to submit work into Kinexus. The first is through the web app, as we're seeing here. The second is through our mobile app. So we have an application on the Apple App Store and the Android Store where you can download and check in and utilize that for your improvement activity. The third is via email. So you can email ideas directly into Kinexus. And the last is via what we call kiosk mode, where you can utilize it as a shared interface for shop floor employees in the front line. They can go walk up, pick their name from a dropdown, submit their improvement work, and then simply go back to the front line or attending patients or whatever that front line looks like for your organization. Submitting an idea can be incredibly simple. That submission screen is completely configurable. And so the trick is making sure that we're asking for the right information at the right time and making it simple enough that you get the information that you need and make it easy for people to submit, but not asking too many questions. We've certainly found that if you want somebody not to do something, just make it complicated. And I assure you that they will not do that specific activity. Here we've made it pretty basic. We'll capture a title and some kind of description.

Speaker 2: Maybe I need better safety gear accessibility. It's too far away and makes it difficult to access.

Speaker 1: Pretty simple. You can add pictures, files, images, supporting documentation, whatever you need as part of this idea submission. And what the system will do will also proactively search through to see if anybody else has submitted anything similar in the past. If so, simply click into those ideas, figure out if somebody else has been working on this and maybe we should be part of that team or we can implement the improvement that they've already implemented and save ourselves the trouble of that specific rework. When you're ready, you can hit the Create button and it'll automatically route your idea to the correct person and place in the organization based on the role that the user has and where they sit in the organizational hierarchy. This is important because it'll help me as the frontline person know who's going to be responsible for getting back to me and closing the communication loop on my idea. And it also lets these three people know that, hey, Greg just submitted a new idea and you all need to go get back to him and route it to the correct spot. You'll notice that it shows up on my dashboard, so anything that I'm responsible for or submitted or a part of. But then it can also show up on more of a team type dashboard. This is one way that an organization will be able to track and manage all of their improvement activity at scale. Greg is part of the Austin location on the network shown here on the left. You'll be able to configure this and drill down as far down as you like between different departments or shifts or locations across different plants or even across the entire enterprise. For those with the right permission, simply seeing what other improvement areas are going on is one click away. It also makes it really easy to see who's not doing work here in the system and utilizing this as a coaching opportunity. Austin and Dallas having lots of improvement work going on. Los Angeles, not quite so much. One improvement project that's been overdue by about a month. So it's time for us as improvement coaches to dig in and figure out what's happening as part of this. We're showcasing all these improvement ideas and activity in more of a Kanban view. But there's plenty of different views to show this improvement activity, such as a list, which is more of an Excel-based column type view, or a parent and child relationship showing GANs or even how this activity tracks on a calendar. So lots of ways to show activity in ways that works best for your information. Now, to actively manage this idea, there's a couple of things that we can do with it. The first is we can just drag and drop it in. If we know what we're going to do and we're going to move forward with it, is simply drag it over into the correct status and then we'll get to work on assigning the team. We can also directly click in for more information, seeing the details of the improvement, the additional information, how we're tagging this improvement, and how we're using it as a coaching opportunity. The additional information, how we're tagging this improvement to make sure we can show up in reporting later can all be done through the design and development of this template that we're looking at. This is more of a simple improvement or a just do it. And so if we know that we're going to move forward with this, again, maybe we just hit assign and we put a due date on it and we give a responsible person and additional team members and tie it to strategic initiatives or prioritize this idea. We can also jump through and say, you know, this is a really good idea and we're going to skip to the end and say, no, we're not going to do it. Give Greg a reason, explain why we're not going to do it. And so he always knows that he's being listened to. And then what's great is we can actually go up and pull these specific ideas back later. Maybe we didn't have enough resources and a couple of months from now, maybe we do have some extra resources and we can go dive into those lists of ideas and try and tackle those that needed those extra resources. The last thing that we'll do is the ability to actually convert this into a new workflow. Maybe this idea is really good and it actually involves a bigger effort and a larger problem solving initiative. And so we need to work this through as an A3 instead. Once we hit convert, it'll bring over all the existing information from that idea into this A3 process. Greg will still be listed as one of the original team members so he'll always have the updates of what happens to that A3 even if he's not part of the solution. And then we'll be able to work through this as an A3. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to open up more of a complete A3 just to give everybody a picture of what that actually could look like in a final state. Again, just an example, I'm sure that many of y'all's A3s look different than this, but lots of the same type of fields and functionality with the background and the current condition, some of the information that we've tagged with it, our countermeasures and specific tasks, before and after pictures, root cause analysis, some of the metrics that we're tracking. And again, all the comments and communication being logged on this A3, keeping it all in one place, making it easy to access for everyone. Each part of the A3, you'll be able to drill down into more to give you more depth and part of the problem solving process. For example, clicking into this countermeasure actually brings up more of a PDCA. So we're able to actually walk through those individual parts of the improvement process within the one project, again, keeping everything all in one place. The last step of the improvement process here is going through the resolution. We ran this project, we made some kind of qualitative or quantitative change, and let's go through and log those. And maybe it's pretty easy, we made a quality or a safety change, but maybe we had a cost savings and now we just want to make sure that we're not going to go through and log all of those. So let's go through and log those. And maybe it's pretty easy, we made a quality or a safety change, maybe we had a cost savings and now we need to actually go through and log those. We have people that run through this with their finance processes and go through different validation steps, many configurable ways to actually help make sure that the numbers that are being put in are valid and worth being tracked here. You can keep it pretty simple for your front end users and putting in just a one-time cost, or even go through and do a forecast and a target and a custom schedule and compare that baseline to actual. There's lots of different ways that you'll be able to go in and track this financial work throughout the system. There's a couple of final steps that you'll be able to put in, such as reviewing it in the future and making sure that maybe in 60 days that it's going to pop back up into our notifications. We can validate that enhancement and make sure that the work that we've done is actually continuing and making sure that it's still a success. And then lastly, we hit complete, and then we'll be able to share out this improvement with anybody that needs to know. Everybody that's been a part of the team will automatically be notified, but there's other groups, other sites, other departments, other divisions, other shifts that need to know, then we can go proactively notify them of this here and make sure that they're actually implementing and replicating that solution as well. The last part of Kinexus that I want to make sure that we walk through today is the reporting aspect of the system. You may be asking, you have all this improvement data, all the participation, all the financial aspects, but what can you actually do with it? The reporting suite in Kinexus is designed to help improvement professionals like yourselves drill down on the problem areas, reward the successes, and roll up all the improvement activity across the organization. Reports in Kinexus are generally geared around three areas, activity, engagement, and impact. So what work is being done? Who's doing that work? And what's the outcome of this work? These are a couple of different examples of some of those reporting activity, and there's a plethora more in our reporting section, but showing what's behind schedule and clicking in and getting those six projects that we can drill down and get more information on. Who's utilizing the system and who's not? So we can figure out how we can get them involved in improvement activity. Who is engaged and who is overburdened with the amount of project work that they're doing that maybe we can figure out how we can get other people more engaged in the system instead. And then of course, the rollup of all the financial information that we've gotten through all of the improvement activity that's been happening across the scale of the enterprise of the organization. Of course, this can be broken down from, again, one department to another, or drilling down into the shifts. Just to recap, today we've submitted an improvement idea. We captured it. We turned it into an A3. We showed an example of a fully functioning A3 and closed that one out and registered the impact to be able to report on all the activity here in the system. I wanna thank everybody for tuning in today. For more information, please visit kinexus.com or reach out to me via the contact info on the slide to learn more. Thanks again and we'll see you at CHI next time.