Modern industrial ninjas and the stolen Roimachine

If you have actively followed our social media channels, you know that Roimians have recently had many reasons to celebrate success with coffee and cake.

On Wednesday, June 12, it was time for Roima Summer Day – the annual summer get-together for our personnel. The day turned out to be quite an effective way to digest all the cake and practice some ninja skills!   

 

The day was opened by Roima’s CEO Jukka Ropponen, who walked us through the highlights of the company’s 5-year-long history and future plans. After that, our HR Manager took the floor, and we got to congratulate some long-term Roimians for amazing 10, 20 and 30 years of service! Once the awards ceremony had ended and the audience had finished doing the wave, quite out of the blue, two ninjas appeared on the stage.

After an intensive ninja fight, we received some terrible news: one of our offices had been broken into, and our most precious possession, Roimachine, had been taken!

Without delay, the two ninjas organized the Roimians in the audience into teams and challenged us to put our ninja skills to the test. If – and only if – we managed to successfully accomplish a series of given tasks, we would get our dear Roimachine back. Luckily for us, around 140 Roimians were present, and together we were able to rise to the challenge.

Old or new tricks

When you think about it, you realize how the ninjas of the past could have taken advantage of our modern tools.

With the help of enterprise resource planning and product management, it would have been easy to organize the strategic and espionage services sold by the ninjas, as well as to ensure that all the equipment they needed would be at the right place at the right time. To that end, our logistics system would also have been very helpful, and the ninjas wouldn’t have needed to wait for their shuriken deliveries for weeks and weeks. With planning and optimization, they could have made sure that all tasks would be assigned efficiently to the right persons. With machine vision and manufacturing operations management, it would have been possible to improve the efficiency of ninja equipment production and ensure that the nijaken swords would not break at the wrong moment. (Source: https://www.oulu.fi/Harukaze/Nissinen_2010.html )

Luckily for our Roima ninjas, we didn’t need to accomplish any suspicious tasks, but instead, we got to put our skills to the test in five groups organized by themes: Agility, Creativity, Targeting, Problem Solving and Mindfulness. All the groups managed to tackle all the challenges set by the master ninja, and we accomplished the mission of saving our precious Roimachine, who actually represents all us Roimians put together.

In Japan, ninjas are known as shinobi, 忍の者, shinobi-no-mono, which means “the one who is very skilled at being invisible”. This is in fact one of the greatest differences between the ninjas of the past and our modern industrial ninjas: every Roimian should be visible!

Towards new adventures

After successful completion of the tasks, we enjoyed a real feast and good company until it was time for everyone to head back to their homes – to Pori, Turku, Seinäjoki, Tampere, Espoo, Kotka… we Roimians can indeed be found all around Finland!

Meanwhile, our Swedish colleagues enjoyed Roima Summer Day in Västerås, both on land and at sea.