Normet, underground mining and tunneling

2013– Normet in Iisalmi in Finland provides advanced solutions for selected customer processes in underground mining and tunneling.

Until five years ago, the company relied for its market development on local agents and franchisers before realising that major growth was only possible if they took over these networks and started developing markets and opportunities themselves. The building block for this strategy: workplace innovation. 

The innovation

Normet invested in dialogue and consistency.

Through a whole set of new communication methods, the company was capable  of not only getting the message to the shop floor but also from the shop floor  to the top.

The company also insists on consistency having quickly learnt that the values of the organisation should be explicit, communicated and ingrained in all levels of the company. 

Results

Normet now profits from an abundance of new innovative ideas in market opportunities, improved processes and products.

And everybody from Normet carries the value-card around. Everyone knows what is important for the business, why this is so and how they can contribute to accomplishing it.

The outcome has been the number of people working for Normet has tripling to 1000 and the turnover has quadrupling within five years. 

Approach 

Normet could have achieved these results by other means, but workplace innovation has speeded up the required change. It is not that Normet didn’t  try other avenues, but with the first steps to new growth, they experienced that top-down management didn’t deliver consistency in approaches and left out a lot of new ideas from the shop floor. 

Themes: Dynamic management; innovation and innovation capacity

Sector: construction

Source: Case

Properties