Features
Everything between the report and the countermeasure
Kumiko is not a thin wrapper around a problem log. Each capability below exists because a specific step in the improvement cycle usually falls over inside a business, and it falls over in the gap between two systems.
The loop
From a two-field report to a countermeasure that holds
Six steps. The first takes about twenty seconds and anyone in the business can do it. The rest happen on the same record, so nothing is re-keyed, re-explained or chased across three systems and somebody’s inbox.
Step 01
Anyone can report it
Somebody picks the part of the business it belongs to and says what happened. Two fields. No category tree, no severity matrix, no questions the person who noticed cannot answer. If reporting is harder than living with the problem, people live with the problem.
Step 02
Classified by reach
The Triage agent reads the description, writes the title, sets the impact (organization wide, department, or individual) and routes it to the team that owns it. The person reporting never sees this step. It simply arrives correctly filed, and leadership can filter on that impact from day one.
Step 03
Get the right people on it
Every problem carries a live thread. The people who own it talk on the record, with read receipts and internal-only notes. The conversation stays attached to the problem instead of scattering across inboxes, chat apps and corridor conversations.
Step 04
Find the cause
Build the fishbone against the six standard categories, People, Process, Equipment, Materials, Measurement and Environment, then drive the five whys until you reach something the business can actually change.
Step 05
Write the A3
Background, current condition, target, the five whys, countermeasures, follow-up. The discipline that makes A3 work, kept as structured fields rather than a document nobody opens again, so it can be searched, compared and reported on across the whole business.
Step 06
Assign and follow up
Each countermeasure becomes a plan item with an owner, a due date and a status. This is the step most improvement programmes skip, and it is the only one that changes what happens next month.
Capabilities
One platform, not five subscriptions
Most businesses run a helpdesk, a chat tool, a project board, a meeting recorder and a shared drive full of half-finished analysis. Kumiko is all of those, joined at the record level, which is the only place the join actually matters.
A collection for every part of the business
IT, facilities, finance, HR, operations, customer service, logistics, retail floor. Each collection has its own owning team, colour and notification address, and can be open to everyone or private to one group. One intake, however many departments you have.
Impact classification, so leaders can filter
Every problem is graded on arrival as organization wide, department level or individual. That single field is what turns thousands of small reports into a leadership view: filter to organization wide and you are looking at the things that actually matter at your level.
Root-cause tooling on the record
Fishbone across six cause categories, five-whys chains, and a full A3 with background, current condition, target, countermeasures and follow-up. Attached to the original report, not filed somewhere separate that nobody opens again.
Cross-department projects
The problems worth fixing rarely sit inside one team. Group related reports from anywhere in the business into a project, give it status columns that match how the work really runs, and track it to completion.
Meetings that leave a record
Schedule the recurring review, run it in the browser, and get an automatic transcript with a summary and extracted key points. What was decided stops depending on who took notes.
A dashboard and a daily brief
Live figures for volume, impact, priority, status, SLA breaches and workload by person. Plus a brief every afternoon naming what recurred across the business today and the actions that follow from it.
Root-cause toolkit
The analysis, as structured data
A3s usually live as documents on a shared drive. Documents cannot be searched across, compared or counted. Kumiko stores each part of the analysis as its own field, which is what makes “show me every problem this year where the root cause was training” a question you can actually ask.
Fishbone
Causes captured against the six standard categories, so the team is prompted to look everywhere rather than stopping at the first plausible answer:
- People
- Process
- Equipment
- Materials
- Measurement
- Environment
The A3
The full report, kept to the discipline that makes A3 work. If it does not fit, you have not understood it yet:
- Background
- Current condition
- Target condition
- Five whys
- Countermeasures
- Follow-up
Plan items
Every countermeasure becomes a tracked commitment. Three fields, and they are the difference between an insight and a change:
- Action
- Owner
- Due date
- Status
Projects and meetings
When one problem becomes a workstream
Some causes are too big for one countermeasure, and most cross department lines. Group the related problems into a project, give it status columns that match how your team actually works, and run the whole improvement initiative without leaving the system that holds the evidence.
- Kanban boards with custom status columns and drag-to-reorder
- A project-wide communication log alongside the per-problem threads
- Recurring reviews with scheduled occurrences
- In-browser meeting rooms, no client to install
- Automatic transcripts, summaries and extracted key points
Measurement
Evidence, not anecdote
The dashboard answers the questions that get asked in the management meeting: what is going wrong, in which part of the business, how often, how far it reaches, and whether it is getting better or worse.
- Problems over time, by department, impact, priority and status
- Open, resolved and closed counts at a glance
- SLA breaches surfaced before the review, not during it
- A leaderboard for throughput and workload balancing
- A full audit log on every field that changes, with who and when
Daily summary, sent 5:00 PM
43
Problems today
12
Organization wide
Top recurring problems
- Expenses portal rejects valid receipts · 7
- Meeting room booking double-books · 5
- New starter accounts not ready day one · 4
Illustrative example. Your brief is generated from your own data each afternoon.
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.