Improvement and Coaching KATA

Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement and Learning

 

Winning, Growing, and Keeping Business

Beating the competition, exceeding customer expectations, and growing profitably isn’t easy. Add to the mix – increasing customer demand, pricing and delivery pressures, and the need to continually improve. Getting to where you want to be just got more challenging. Throw on top the workforce shortage and your growth goals may seem unreachable. Your employees are the key to a successful strategy.

Engage and Equip Your Team with Improvement Kata

When employees are attempting to solve problems in different ways, there is less efficiency, lost production, dissatisfied employees, and potentially a negative impact to the bottom line. The solution is to provide them with a life-long skill that makes continuous improvement a habit. Improvement Kata:

  • engages all employees in deliberate and daily practice of continous improvement
  • enables teams to navigate together towards the same goals, address obstacles, and develop solutions
  • creates a pattern that becomes habit or second nature
  • promotes measuring and evaluating the impact of any improvement efforts

Company Success

“We first heard about Kata during a tour of a world-class company that we benchmark against, but had no idea how to pursue this new (to us) problem-solving method. NWIRC’s Tom Weible coached us through our first Kata challenge with amazing results that are proving to be long lasting. We now use Kata as the basis for all our improvement efforts.”
-Dan Ignasiak, President, SEPCO

“Before learning kata, we often used a shotgun approach to solving problems and never really knew what solved the issue or the actual impact of the change or improvement. Now we work as a team to determine the next target condition towards the goal. Documentation is key to keep track of things we’ve tried and results, so we don’t try the same thing again. It’s one step at a time, and having a coach helps keep us on target and motivated.”
–Paul Brown, Maintenance Manager, SEPCO

Take the Next Step

Improvement Kata Training
Register for a scheduled Improvement Kata training to develop skills for doing and teaching a routine of thinking (kata) in your daily work, or host a training onsite at your facility.

Coaching Kata
Coaching Kata is a set of teaching routines for facilitating Improvement Kata skill development in daily work. The purpose of the Coaching Kata is to teach the Improvement Kata pattern through deliberate practice, while using real-world goals and problems. If you have specific improvement goals, NWIRC’s onsite coaching sessions can help guide you through the process of working towards achieving your identified challenges.