Arla Oy is the leading Finnish dairy company with a strong focus in research and development. Arla's vision is to develop products that are close to nature and Arla's customers in Finland benefit from locally developed and produced dairy products ranging from various types of milks to cookery products.
Annica Lindblom works as a Senior Key Account Manager at Arla Oy, a subsidiary of Arla Foods, and is responsible for selected retailers and leading a team of sales representatives. Arla is a very customer-oriented company with the ability and will to listen to consumers and customers. To emphasize the importance of listening, Annica states that “Finnish consumers and customers play an essential role in helping us further develop our product portfolio.”
At Arla, the employees that are in daily contact with consumers are Annica’s team of sales representatives. These professionals help consumers select the right products for their needs, and thanks to daily customer contact they play an essential role in providing customer feedback to Arla’s research and development teams.
As you can imagine, it is in Arla’s interests to develop the sales rep team to increase performance as this has several direct and indirect business benefits. To help the team further improve, Annica wanted to find improvement ideas easily and quickly, yet in a way that would create a true commitment to the decisions made based on the results. Innoduel, the easiest co-creation tool, seemed to promise the ease, speed and engagement. Not to waste any time, ”Cooperative democracy” was put in action as Annica and Elina from Innoduel crafted the content of two Innoduel arenas and the whole team was then invited to co-create answers to two critical questions:
The co-creation phase took a short period of time and one beauty of the Innoduel co-creation arenas is that the result, which is a ranking list of qualitative answer options, is immediately available once the arena are closed.
”The results of the two co-creation arenas were immediately shared and analyzed within the sales rep team and after discussing we made concrete decisions on which improvement ideas to take further”, elaborates Annica.
”Innoduel is an easy and fast way to collect improvement ideas from a larger group of people. We could have used post -its to collect and prioritise ideas but the ease of use and speed that Innoduel provides in the brainstorming process is just something different”, Annica added.
In conclusion, Annica recommends Innoduel when there is a need to engage employees in finding improvement ideas — and when you want to do it easily and quickly.
