Car retailer Veho

Veho set off to a new strategy period supported by LATO

Veho, the leading Finnish car retailer has implemented LATO’s strategy execution and follow-up software. The company now has one common tool to ensure the transparency over the different business areas, as well as to support the leadership and communication.

– The main theme of our new strategy is “One Veho”. Staying true to this principle we can now direct and manage all business areas in one tool transparently. LATO is the method we use on all the forums, it is reviewed both in the Board meetings as well as in the Management team meetings and business areas’ Management teams, Veho’s CFO Anssi Räsänen says.

Veho strated with LATO in the beginning of the new strategy period in early 2016. In the past, each business area had had an own solution for monitoring the strategic objectives.

Veho’s LATO is arranged by strategic initiatives and objectives are cascaded under them. Businesses can also create their own separate operational objectives, which are, however, always linked to the top-level strategic themes.

LATO is a powerful tool for leadership and communication 

– LATO is really agile, and very easy to use, says Räsänen. – A smooth start requires dialogue with key people in advance. In our case the contribution from the business development managers in the introduction has been significant. It is essential that the depth and precision of the objectives is agreed together, so we know how we describe our goals. In the projects involving more than one business area, the ownership must be clearly agreed.

– LATO is strong leadership and communication tool. The best way to root the system into the organization is to work with key people, show example and reward people for using the tool efficiently, Räsänen says. – We have a commonly agreed cycle for status updates, a date by which all comments and data needs to be in the system.

LATO is used by management and key people

Initially Veho had planned to introduce LATO only for strategic corporate projects. During the planning and objective setting, however, it was decided to expand the use to the operational level as well.

– In Veho there is just over 50 LATO users, and they all have access to the mobile application, too, says Erno Launo, Business Development Director from LATO. – The feedback has been enthusiastic; LATO brings transparency concreteness to the strategic plans.

– We use LATO to manage and follow what people do, to see the progress of the goals and tasks. If progress is not visible in the system, it does not exist, Anssi Räsänen says.