As discussed in our previous articles, process and manufacturing industries are facing an important challenge when it comes to bringing increased intelligence into their products, services and production in the upcoming years, in order to continue to deliver added value to their customers. In these large-scale digital development programs that characterize the 2020’s, a wide range of expertise is required to ensure that all aspects are taken into consideration and the intended business benefits are realized. In this blog, we will introduce some of our digital transformation leaders.

Jarmo Hiljanen, Senior Managing Consultant, Program Manager, eMBA, Engineer Computer Sciences

Jarmo is a seasoned program manager who has been working in the manufacturing sector for over 18 years, with a specialization in rubber wheeled machines. He has a deep understanding of product and service development, training new businesses on data and ramping up all required operations to deliver new services for the end-users. Jarmo’s background is in software development.

Jarmo has led multiple large-scale product and service business transformations in the manufacturing sector, that included strategy planning, business model creation, setup of the DevSecOps development organization and operation, as well as rollout of the new service.

Interesting future project:

“I have always wanted to dive into the marine industry. Ships and even yachts are like moving cities, so the opportunity to have a real impact by introducing new digital products or services for the people on board and for fleet managers would be very interesting.”

Ilkka von Schulman, Executive Advisor

Ilkka is an enthusiastic innovator and change driver, who has worked as a management and digital consultant for more than 20 years. He is strongly customer and service design focused. He is also continuously looking for new and better ways to utilize data in services and the service process to simplify life and to enable a new generation of services.

Ilkka led a team of data scientists in a project, where a manufacturing company was looking for opportunities to increase their service business’s use of operative and automation data. Ilkka pushed the team to study the data and find new ways to harvest business value from it. This project was a success and resulted in a launch of widespread digital service development in the manufacturing company.

Interesting future project:

“Sales and marketing in the manufacturing industry are lagging due to digital-heavy financial and telecom services. The ‘wine & dine’ sales culture is deeply rooted. I would love to help a manufacturing firm to utilize customer data and digital marketing tools to boost their sales and sales efficiency.”

Matti Ketonen, Senior Managing Consultant, PhD System Engineering, MBA International Finance

Matti is an experienced supply chain professional with 30 years of experience developing and operating solutions in various industrial contexts. Business process development skills have given him opportunities to lead improvement projects in all parts of the value chain, ranging from customer interaction to sourcing activities. His approach is human-centered but his toolbox includes methods from traditional automation to artificial intelligence.

Matti ran a program looking for artificial intelligence solutions for long-standing challenges in a manufacturing company. Several proof-of-concept and pilot scale exercises were carried out. Some of the trials led to industrialized solutions and breakthroughs in the wider use of already existing data. Solutions were developed with a large number of internal and external partners. With the variety of skills and expertise, several new and scalable solutions were developed.

Interesting future project:

“It would be nice to combine my supply chain and artificial intelligence expertise to develop and implement a full set of planning and execution solutions for a manufacturing company. This would include the use of a combination of human ability to generalize and consider new information combined with the brute power and novel data handling solutions of machines, using business process modeling and measurement as a framework.”

Mikko Särkkä, Senior Managing Consultant, M.Sc., Computer Integrated Manufacturing and Industrial Engineering

Mikko has over 20 years of experience in demanding ICT positions in the services, logistics and manufacturing sectors, and is seen as a trusted advisor by many business people. He has skills in a wide range of the ICT domain, including holding CIO positions for more than 10 years. He has formulated digital strategies, created enterprise architecture and digital development roadmaps for businesses and led digital transformation in large scale business process changes. He is a leader who can get his team enthusiastic about the change and empowered to deliver results.

Mikko has led the innovating, designing and building of IoT enabled predictive facility maintenance service in close cooperation with business and customers. He has also crafted tech solutions, serving as a tech partner for operation model design and lead implementation projects that have increased throughput and efficiency in logistics processes like order capture, logistics planning, sorting, delivery and transportation management.

Interesting future project:

“I’m passionate about delivering results and adding value for customers, by implementing innovative solutions based on digital technology. I really enjoy leading transformation and getting my team enthusiastic about the change. My anticipated projects in the future could include phases ranging from digital innovation, strategy work and roadmapping to engaging projects and leading transformation. It would be particularly interesting to work on projects focusing on the development of operation models and organizational capabilities in companies to scale their digital businesses and support growth.”

Jukka Kauppinen, Executive Advisor (Industrial Companies), M.Sc Economics (Information Systems Science)

Jukka has more than a decade of advisory and project management experience with large industrial equipment manufacturers in the fields of service and digital transformation, data driven customer engagement, product data and lifecycle management, as well as digitalization enabled asset optimization.

In addition, Jukka has been “fixing the foundation” for many companies to be able to leverage data-driven capabilities and launch new digital concepts and services. These foundational elements include for example, master data management, harmonization of application landscape and implementing mechanisms for portfolio and product management.

Jukka has led the definition and the implementation of a data-driven maintenance management system for a large industrial equipment manufacturer. He was responsible for managing the concept and requirements definition work, vendor selection and the actual implementation, together with the customer’s business stakeholders, IT architects and a 3rd party development team.

Interesting future project:

“I usually work as the bridge between business and IT, converting complex business challenges to clear target operating models, architectures, development roadmaps and actionable items for both business and IT. My focus areas are in portfolio and product management, product data and lifecycle management, digitalization-enabled customer engagement capabilities and service transformation.”

Teemu Metsola, Director, Digital Business Services. M.Sc Economics, Officer

Teemu is an enthusiastic business transformation professional. Almost 20 years of development experience has given a solid background to understand how important cultural and human related aspects are in transformation. In his approach, technology is a good and needed enabler. However, real transformation happens always outside of IT-systems. In addition to his field-tested transformation experience, he has a large methodological toolbox (including architecture design, concept development and experimentation and business strategy planning).

Teemu was managing the project that delivered Artificial Intelligence Roadmap for Finnish Defence. The roadmap encouraged the military to utilize in its capability development already existing artificial intelligence technologies, and those technical features which will be available within upcoming years. The roadmap simultaneously reduced the mysticism of artificial intelligence from a functional development point view: When utilizing AI technologies, the same success factors still exist for functional development as have already been used.

Interesting future project:

“I am willing to lead a large-scale development program that includes ambitious business development goals with open-minded usage of emerging technology and data analytics. I really enjoy utilizing my competence as a bridge between business owners and technology. It is even better if the focus of the development is network oriented. In many cases, companies are undertaking internal development. However, in the2020s value chains do not follow single companies but integrate several companies together. Players who are capable of creating ecosystem-oriented business solutions with a digital boost will succeed!”

Interested in knowing more?

Learn more about our team in the links above! At Midagon, the profiles introduced in this blog are accompanied with a broad variety of subject matter expertise, ranging from fixing technical systems and operations to comprehensive business transformation. This kind of variety, in our opinion, is pivotal in achieving digital development at scale.

As stated, in the 2020’s, digital solutions will become an integral part of all areas of business and organizations, and the companies that achieve this first, will gain a significant advantage in serving their customers with the speed and efficiency they require. We look forward to bringing you our digital business white paper, where we dig deeper into how the transformation can be achieved and present real-life cases about what has already been done, later this fall.