This year, Roima was again a partner of the most important Supply Chain event of the year. Management Events 600Minutes SCM was organized on September 28 at Helsinki Messukeskus Expo and Convention Center.
In the keynote speech of the seminar, Pentti Puhakka, Director of Manufacturing Solutions at Kone Oy brought up an interesting priority list ranking the prerequisites of Kone’s strong global growth. The very first point in the list was putting product structures in order, allowing products to be easily manufactured at different plants. Excellent! Seldom does one hear a director of a listed company mention the word product structure. And not just that – another slide included the words module structure and common language!
During the day, Roima’s representatives got to meet with a total of 61 customers. The most heated topic raised was the importance of networking and the challenges of communicating changes to the entire supply chain. Current information systems have been designed for the needs of a single company. Those need are satisfactorily met, but when you should send drawings to subcontractors or would like to see quality deviation reports of the subcontractor’s production, the amount of manual work and Excel sheets are simply beyond description. Not to even mention a situation where the original plans suddenly change…
On this basis, it was great to present Roima’s strategic focus of supporting networked manufacturing and introduce our cloud-based solution platform for controlled sharing of product information in supplier network and for change management.

Digitalization may raise uncertainty

One important aspect in building digitalized business is to take into account that everything new is sometimes scary. People make the change required by digitalization together, including those who are afraid of change. The purpose is to facilitate work and increase efficiency, support the delivery of results, but when poorly done, the only thing we create is just a “digitalized chaos”. And this certainly doesn’t promote growing competitiveness.
To sum up, the desired outcome can only be achieved through people, and with the help of an experienced partner.

Positive outlook and good vibes

Compared to the last year’s corresponding event, the general mood was clearly more optimistic – people were genuinely looking for solutions, and the discussions at the meetings went straight to the point. The event left us with a positive vibe, and Burtsi put these expectations on the table right away in his morning video greetings at the main hall, talking about competitive supply network today and tomorrow.