MAPS

MAPS is a set of jointly built practices and metrics based on five strategic themes, with the central aim of responding to customer needs in the best possible way and creating success for them.

MAPS doesn’t mean we’re finished. It’s a tool and a way of working that we’ve built together for the continuous improvement and development of our operations, so that we can respond even better to our customers’ needs. MAPS is therefore not a project with an end date.

On this site, we take a closer look at MAPS from different angles, so welcome to explore our world! For our part, we want to make domestic subcontracting chains run more smoothly and, through that, help our partners succeed as well. We hope every company can find their own MAPS, and that our story can serve as a source of inspiration for creating it.

How did MAPS come about?

In 2019, WITAS, the Viitasaari region development company, launched the “Laatu lähtee lapasesta” business group project with support from the ELY Centre (the Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment). The companies from northern Central Finland taking part in the project had both the need and the will to invest in continuously improving their operations. The focus areas were eliminating waste in processes, creating clear work instructions, developing working methods, investing in occupational safety, and continuous quality improvement. The challenging availability of labour in small localities also prompted the companies to look for ways to become more efficient without a major need to add staff.

Suomen Osaamistalo Oy (now LeanMe, https://leanme.fi/) was chosen as the project’s expert partner. Osaamistalo’s experts have created a “pedal car factory” concept that helps companies achieve and maintain smoother ways of working. Their approach is very different from what companies had learned before, because the underlying idea is to drive change from the shop floor rather than from management.

Maarla first sent a small task force to try out the pedal car training. And that’s when things really got going! The team came back from the training brimming with enthusiasm, feeling they had found the right way for us to start developing our operations. That sparked a three-year project, during which we trained our entire staff in two separate training programmes, and MAPS gradually took shape – and it continues to develop and grow stronger. The financial investment in training our whole workforce has been considerable, but it has paid off.

Why hasn’t MAPS remained just a project, but keeps on living?

MAPS has developed gradually, entirely to meet our own needs. The pedal car training gave us a new, shared way of thinking, which each of us has gradually adopted in our own work. The journey hasn’t been without problems, and it hasn’t been easy, but it has been an extremely rich and interesting shared learning journey.

MAPS has brought together the teams, ways of working, organisational culture and management practices of Maarla Group’s three companies into a single whole, and that journey continues. MAPS has given us the slogan “Together we succeed”, whose key idea is to help not only ourselves but others succeed too. We want to learn to be team players. The starting point is the question: “How can I help other stages of the work succeed at the right time, to the right quality, and without disruption?”

MAPS is like a diamond. It began forming from small, separate particles under great pressure. Its discovery brought joy, but it’s only the polishing stage that has begun to bring out its full brilliance. And for that polishing, we have every one of us at Maarla to thank!