Lean and Howwe

Discover the Interplay between Daily and Strategic Steering for Accelerated Growth.

Lean management is a set of practices aimed at enhancing efficiency and effectiveness by eliminating waste in operations.

Widely applied in industrial and manufacturing sectors, Lean manufacturing or Lean production employs a range of techniques and activities tailored to specific operations. Despite their varied applications, these methods share a core principle: eradicating non-value-adding activities and waste from the business.

Background and challanges

Lean as a concept is at the core aligned with the same vision of the Howwe way of working. They work very well together and philosophically share some core beliefs. However, we know that for teams implementing Howwe’s strategic execution software that already have Lean in place or is currently implementing Lean there sometimes is a strong “we already have method for this”-sentiment, or team members feel that they already do what Howwe suggest they should do, and now they need to do it twice.

Howwe and our strategic execution software is in fact a complement to the way most Lean-enabled teams work today.

Benefits of working with Lean

Increase the proactive sales to the profitable housing market
Keep the OTIF, On Time In Full, on a high level
Connect the daily operational control incl. LEAN within the factories with the company’s overall Most Important Goals
Increasing the cross-functionality and ownership – succeed in getting the full power out of an organization
Get the company’s leaders to go from acting reactively to proactively in their daily management and follow-up

Kaizen/daily steering vs. Strategic steering with Howwe’s strategic execution software

How to connect the daily steering (LEAN, Kaizen, etc.) within the factories with the company’s overall Most Important Goals?

Jonas Hernborg

CEO at Elitfönster

Elitfönster use Lean for their daily steering and Howwe’s strategic execution software to keep the strategic direction and secure acceleration of growth of their most important goals.

Jonas Hernborg, you have an organization with both white and blue collars. How does Howwe’s strategic execution software and the Howwe way of working align in the organization with daily steering, such as Lean?

When you’re running a production facility, there are endless operational parameters you try to optimize on a daily basis. The primary tool is the daily steering within the LEAN framework and that’s really running your typical day-to-day stuff.
However, you can’t rely only on the day-to-day tools, you need to connect this also to where we are heading and a lot of time the behavioral change we need to do overtime – which is more on a strategic level. Howwe adds the strategic direction of where you want to go.

Basically, you can say that the daily steering is the instrument panel of the car but Howwe is used as your GPS to get them going in the right direction and get the behavior of going in the right direction for the company and the people working there. They complement each other and we need both.

Patrik Parnfors

Vice President Commercial at Howwe Technologies

“Many of the companies we support within the manufacturing and industrial sector struggle with the implementation of their interdivisional and global transformation projects. Modernization and automation of an often traditional industry are key. With massive organizations, aligning the whole organization and making the business plan actionable on all levels is challenging.

Howwe supports many of the world’s largest brands to achieve both organization-wide transformation and acceleration of financial results. Let me show you what Howwe can do for your organization.”

Our Customers’ Impressive ROI

At Howwe, we pride ourselves on delivering tangible, measurable results through our strategic execution software. Take a look at the remarkable return on investment that two of our esteemed customers achieved within their first 12 months of utilizing Howwe and our powerful execution software.

How Elitfönster got a ROI of 25x

Elitfönster, Sweden’s leading producer of windows and doors, employs LEAN for daily operational optimization. By integrating Howwe’s strategic execution software, they achieve the strategic direction and behavioral shifts required to attain their financial goals.

Measurable and proven acceleration of growth

Percent

of our clients succeed in achieving an ROI between 3.5 to 9 (Return on Investment calculated on EBIT)

Percent

of our clients succeed in achieving an ROI between 10 to 25 (Return on Investment calculated on EBIT)

Introduction to the Howwe Way of Working

The Howwe Way of Working consists of three main concepts. These are:

MIGs (Most Important Goals). These are the few goals your team has chosen to focus on for the next 12 months. Related to this is the so-called “top MIG”, which as the name suggests is the organization’s very top goal, the one that the management group is working towards. All team MIGs should be in aid of the top MIG, meaning that achieving them will help to achieve the top MIG.

Key Activities: Key Activities are the activities that need to be conducted each week to reach the team MIG.

Acceleration Meeting: At the core of the Howwe Way of Working is what we call “relentless execution”. What we mean by this is that if the whole team focuses on the activities needed to achieve the goals every week, progress is evident quite fast. In the Howwe Way of Working this is in a short team meeting every week where last week’s progress and next week’s commitment are discussed.

Here is what the Howwe way of working can look like for a production company.

Examples of Most Important Goals for Production

Examples of Key Activities for a Production Manager

Sprint – Key Activities

Sprint Key Activities helps teams to become more focused on what truly matters. It supports leaders to unite their team around their agenda rather than the different functional or individual priorities.

Management Team Elitfönster

Tips for working with Sprint Key Activities

Howwe Technologies met up with Micael Broström, Sales & Marketing Director at Elitfönster, to get his perspective on modern leadership and the benefits of working with Sprint Key Activities.

Howwe Technologies AB (publ) stands at the forefront of SaaS innovation as the creators
of Howwe, the Solution for Growth.
With our method and software, we simplify the
execution of strategy. Empowering businesses globally, we’re committed to redefining
strategy execution and driving sustainable financial growth.

Howwe

Insights

Howwe Technologies
[email protected]
Org. nr. 556655-7509

New York City Office
135 West 50th Street, 2nd Floor,
New York, NY, 10019

Stockholm Office
Malmskillnadsgatan 29
111 57 Stockholm
08-243 110

Box: 270 40.
102 51 Stockholm