Successful lean enterprises continually strive to improve quality, safety, and capacity to better serve customers. These efforts can help reduce waste and improve flow, bringing greater value to customers and improved organizational performance.

For those new to lean methodology, it can be challenging to connect how kaizen, the process of continuous improvement, can lead to improved quality and safety, higher revenue, lower expenses, and increased margins. That’s why our Return on Kaizen (ROK) system helps you set goals and targets and equips you with the necessary tools to measure your organizational improvement investment.

How ROK Works

ROK is an evidence-based, disciplined system that enables health care organizations to capture, calculate, and roll up the value derived from your improvement efforts. ROK can help you measure, analyze, understand, and ultimately act on data directly pulled from the gemba, or the actual work place.

As your organization sets targets in improvement workshops and across value streams, goals are translated into meaningful key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be linked to cost reductions or evidence-based quality improvements. Identifying KPIs encourages more thorough remeasures and follow-ups, creating the conditions necessary for long-term sustainment of process improvements. 

To work towards improved throughput and reduced costs, our professionals can guide your organization in conducting time and motion studies, providing actionable data that helps deliver concrete results.

How ROK Helps You

ROK advances the intraorganizational skills necessary for a successful lean transformation by:

• Supporting planning for value stream maps and kaizen workshops
• Translating documented improvements into financial savings and capacity gains
• Providing a single place to record all key improvement model assumptions as well as baseline, target, and actual data
• Supporting evidence-based selection of improvement targets
• Making available reports to support target selection in strategic planning, known as hoshin kanri
• Understanding the direct benefit of standardized operations to improving patient safety

ROK provides superior decision support to frontline managers, guiding them to pursue improvements that have measurable value for patient safety, clinical quality, and financial stewardship. When incorporated into the hoshin kanri strategy deployment process, ROK can also help align organization-wide improvements with a focused set of strategic targets.