Why Continuous Improvement Programs Don't Get Funded (52 characters)

Continuous improvement work creates real value. Most of that value never reaches executives in a form they can trust.

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In this recorded webinar, Jeff Roussel, Chief Revenue Officer at KaiNexus, argues that CI does not have an impact problem. It has a translation problem. Only about 28 percent of the improvements tracked in KaiNexus show a direct, visible financial impact. So when an executive asks what the organization is actually getting from all this work, the answer usually arrives as a spreadsheet, a set of caveats about data quality, and a week of effort. That does not build confidence.

Jeff walks through what changes when improvement work gets described in the language leaders already use. Examples include a hospital system that documented $137 million in savings after reserving operating rooms for emergency cases and adjusting scheduling patterns, a global mining company with roughly 284,000 improvements and $178 million in impact across 12,000 employees, and a fintech company that went from $4.5 million to $15 million in documented savings in a year after deciding that if an improvement was not in the system, it did not count.

He also offers a structure for the next funding conversation. Start with the pain. Move to the impact on a metric leadership already cares about. Then make a focused ask, such as a 90-day pilot with one team and one metric, rather than asking to transform the whole program.

Mark Graban hosts and joins Jeff for an extended Q&A on:

Balancing short-term results against long-term thinking
Whether a CI program should fund itself beyond startup costs
How to handle soft benefits like engagement, morale, and quality without inflating the numbers
How to get the meeting when executives are not giving you their time
Why the problem with spreadsheets is usually trust, not the spreadsheets

Jeff offered to help listeners think through their own business case, whether or not software is part of the conversation: [email protected]

More than 100 free recorded webinars: https://www.kainexus.com/webinars
Continuous improvement blog: https://blog.kainexus.com
Podcast: https://www.kainexus.com/podcast