About
Named after a joint that holds without nails
Kumiko is a Japanese woodworking technique. Hundreds of thin strips of timber, each cut to a precise angle, assembled into a lattice with no glue and no fasteners. Every piece is doing a small job. The strength is in how they fit together.
That is a reasonable description of a well-run business. No single fix carries the load. What carries the load is a great many small, precise corrections, each one made because somebody noticed something and wrote it down, and each one fitted properly to the ones around it.
Why we built it
We kept meeting organisations doing continuous improvement genuinely well on paper, trained facilitators, a wall of A3s, a kaizen calendar, while the actual problems arrived through half a dozen disconnected systems that had no idea any of that existed. The capture system and the improvement system had no connection, so analysis only ever happened for incidents big enough to justify pulling a team into a room. Everything smaller got closed and forgotten, and then happened again.
Kumiko exists to remove the gap between those two systems. Not to make people do more improvement work, but to make the improvement work land in the same place the problem did.
What we believe
- Reporting must be trivially easy. Every required field you add is a percentage of problems you will never hear about.
- Analysis belongs on the record. If the A3 lives in a separate folder, it is documentation. If it lives on the problem record, it is a working method.
- A countermeasure without an owner is a wish. Name and date, or it did not happen.
- Your data is yours. Including the part the AI sees. That is why local model endpoints are a first-class option and not an enterprise upsell.
- Say what the software does. Not what it will do next quarter.

Kumiko · Get in touch
What is the problem you do not know about costing you?
Half an hour, your real problems, no slide deck. Bring one issue that keeps coming back and we will walk it through Kumiko end to end: capture, triage, fishbone, A3, countermeasure.