Posintra

LATO digitized the follow-up of Posintra's service production

Posintra Ltd is a regional development company in the eastern Uusimaa region, from which the local owner entities acquire business development services and regional cooperation and lobbying services. Posintra's service production is guided by the company's strategy and supported by annual service agreements with the owner municipalities and companies.

Posintra launched LATO in early 2017.  According to Topi Haapanen, the reporting process of company results and operations had been developed already before LATO introduction. However, Posintra repeatedly heard messages that the company's goals and activities were unknown to important stakeholders. To meet the challenges, Posintra decided to launch a development project to digitalize and to provide mobile tracking of the service contracts progress and status. Digitalized tool would then serve of the owner municipalities and employees themselves.

Clarify goals and collect experiences

Posintra implemented the development project and LATO implementation in stages and systematically according to the steps described below.
The preparatory stage (1 month)

1. Preparation of municipal service contracts
2. Tool selection 
3. Matching service agreements to the tool 

Definition stage (1-2 months)

1. Inputting material to the system
2. Specifying goals and actions with teams
3. Tool deployment with employees

Implementation stage (~6 months)

1. Integrate the usage into Posintra’s own management model
2. Launch with customers
3. Continuous use and evaluation

Initial stage improvement

1. Fine-tuning of the structure and content of goals
2. Bringing the goals of the new financial year into the tool
3. Connect tool as part of ISO quality management system

The set goals were achieved. In the implementation stage, the goal and action planning work took more working time than originally planned. According to Topi Haapanen, this was mainly due to the fact that the more the LATO's opportunities and ideology were familiarized with, the more the personnel usage and the service contract content evolved. Specially, they wanted to make sure that the goal and actions content was not finalized in the management team, but that Posintra's staff were invited to work themselves and together. The goal was and is that the personnel is able to improve their own way of work during LATO content planning and doing so also the commitment towards their development projects's goals is greatly improved.

The decision of the continuation was easy

"Implementation with the personnel was an interesting process. As a tool for LATO will increase the mutual dialogue between our employees, in case we are successful in employee allocating of goals and actions. Achieved success can be evaluated in terms of more balanced distribution of work among teams withing their job description, of improved information flow within the company and of clearly better focus of doing, " says Topi Haapanen.

The decision to continue using LATO after piloting was easy, as the tool was found to solve many of the challenges associated with achieving goals and verifying their success and progress. The real-time and digitalized tracking capability offered to key customers increases Posintra's competitiveness as a modern and customer-driven operator with efficient and transparent operations. The LATO software also provides great support for responding to future changes and changes in regional vitality development practises and culture.

The final result is more sustainable leadership capability

LATO software has later combined Company own strategy follow-up with goals and actions alongside service agreements. According to Topi Haapanen, LATO application has enabled new management practices and made the entire staff think in a new way. From people leadership
viewpoint change management and implementation works best by engaging and giving all the time it takes for the development and discussions. The internal management forums every two weeks run smoothly with the help of LATO, when the meetings quickly reach the point, discuss and decide on important issues.