Vaisala

People-centric renewal of the system environment enabled successful change

Vaisala is a world-leading company specialised in weather, environmental, and industrial measurement solutions that serve global markets and industrial customers, which are dependent on environmental and weather data. Leading science-based technological innovations is at the core of Vaisala’s business. Consequently, the company invests heavily in research and development.

OBJECTIVE

Operational efficiency through global harmonisation of processes and ERP renewal

Vaisala’s previous enterprise resource planning (ERP) system was at the end of its life cycle and no longer enabled the company’s long-term digitalisation goals. The company decided to renew its ERP system to enable automation, more flexible support for core business functions, real-time data for business reporting, and readiness for digital trading and moving technology solutions to cloud services. In addition to the ERP system renewal, the project included several other system solutions such as new analytics, travel expense management, and work time reporting solutions.

One of the main goals of the transformation program was to enable the efficiency and harmonisation of processes and tools on a global scale. The realisation of business benefits will occur in the long term, once the processes and practices become standardised and more efficient, and new digital capabilities become part of the company’s operations.

To achieve the desired business benefits, simply renewing information systems and processes was not enough. All users needed to significantly change their ways of working. Vaisala recognised the importance of leading the people side of change and made it an integral part of the project alongside the technical implementation. This ensured that people were involved in the change from the start and that the end-user perspective was considered from the beginning of the project.

SOLUTION

Driving change in a people-centric manner by developing organisational change capability

Gofore acted as a partner on Vaisala’s change journey, supporting the systematic and people-driven change approach over the period of two years. Change management measures were planned in alignment with the overall project schedule. Active engagement of project and leadership stakeholders ensured that the project was not viewed solely from an IT perspective, but it had a strong people element in it.

During the project, key stakeholders were supported through various learning and communication efforts. Change communication was planned and implemented systematically. Stakeholders were kept up to date through info sessions and via intranet. In terms of training, special emphasis was placed on developing the trainers’ skills, in addition to building training materials and a learning environment.

One significant reason for the success of end-user training events was the choice of training method, selected by the process analysis. Process functionalities, which are repeated frequently and are critical to the business, were supported with trainings in which system exercises were carried out with realistic data, while for less frequently repeated processes, a lighter training method was applied, focusing on demos and good work instructions. This optimised training resources and the time end-users spent on training.

Without the help of change management professionals, supervisors’ significant role in change would not have been understood. Thanks to this realisation, efforts were made to involve team leaders, and it produced results.

Tytti Erkama, Vice President, Information Technology, Program Director

By training and developing the change capability of supervisors, Vaisala wanted to ensure that key leaders have the necessary expertise and understanding of upcoming changes as well as change management methods. This way the leaders were able to support their teams on the challenging change journey ahead. Those affected by the change always wonder how the change will impact them in practice. The project team spent a lot of time identifying role-specific change impacts from both a system and operational perspective. This way role-specific impact could be communicated and trained to those affected by the change to strengthen their understanding.

Furthermore, supporting locations outside of Finland was seen as particularly crucial from a change management perspective. Through global involvement, Vaisala wanted to ensure smooth information exchange and increased understanding across organisational boundaries. Establishing and facilitating a change influencer network ensured that change was implemented throughout the organisation.

Data-driven management is an intrinsic part of operations at Vaisala, and therefore the project used Gofore’s Celkee Insight tool to measure the organisation’s readiness for change. Based on the measurement results, plans were modified to meet the needs of the organisation. Through the measurement results, business units’ leaders were able to gain valuable insight in preparing their own unit for the change.

RESULT

Organisational change-readiness enabled successful implementation

Due to the focus on change management and end-user involvement, Vaisala was well-prepared for the system implementation. However, no change journey ends with the rollout. At Vaisala, the organisation’s learning journey and rooting of the change continue until new practices become part of everyday work. In particular, the focus on supervisors was found valuable to support change execution.

Vaisala also appreciated the expertise of the consultants involved in the project, as well as the opportunity to utilise Gofore’s experience in carrying out similar projects more broadly.

“Gofore’s knowledge sharing practices allowed us to access learnings from other similar projects, which was extremely useful for us,” says Suvi Rantonen, Head of Process Excellence, responsible for change management in the project.