Vaasan Oy is a Finnish bakery company that operates also in the Baltic countries. We have been baking in Finland since 1849, which makes Vaasan Oy Finland’s second oldest bakery. Its most known brands are Vaasan Ruispalat, Vaasan Taika and Vaasan Isopaahto.
Source: www.vaasan.fi
Vaasan Oy and Thinking Portfolio started the implementation project of the project portfolio in specification workshops in March 2015. The application started operations in June – August. One important reason why Thinking Portfolio was chosen as Vaasan Oy project portfolio application was the possibility to implement it in a short time and benefit from its use quickly.
Photo: Our team using Thinking Portfolio
Strategy and development manager Nina Tuomikangas says that their choice became clearer during the purchasing process. Thinking Portfolio was perceived as a tool which, in addition to fast implementation, had clarity and simplified functionality on the plus-side. It was easy to start the development of project practices with an easy-to-use tool.
– We wanted to start quickly and ensure that we will not try to build a solution that is too complicated. The most important things were that the basic processes and the management process were specified.
– During reference visits it was confirmed that Thinking Portfolio has enough capacity for later on, when the maturity level in our company increases.
The project portfolio was started with product development projects
Product development projects were entered into the portfolio immediately in the implementation stage. By managing user rights we could display the right kind of information to the project leader as well as buyers, product developers and the people responsible for project sales, supply chain and finances.
– The feedback from users has been genuinely positive and all are extremely satisfied. Special thanks are given to the fact that the same tool offers many different things and that managing overlapping information has disappeared.
– Thinking Portfolio has already been put to use in all countries taking part in product development process, i.e. in Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
The project portfolio shows which way strategic projects should be managed
In addition to product development projects Vaasan Oy uses the project portfolio to manage strategic development projects. Thinking Portfolio has also well adapted to support the management of Vaasan Oy new strategic project.
– With our governance model described in Thinking Portfolio we will get good transparency, we can see where the focus points are and which we still need to invest into.
The use of Thinking Portfolio is still being expanded
Vaasan Oy has also investigated resource planning features in Thinking Portfolio and in future we plan to implement them more widely. With wider use of resource planning we wish to improve the forecasting of resource position bottle-necks. We are also thinking of further increasing the transparency of the project situation to the management.
– Our choice was spot-on and we have been satisfied with Thinking Portfolio both as an application and a supplier. We can absolutely recommend it to others!
Contact information:
Nina Tuomikangas
Director, Strategy & Development
Vaasan Fresh Bakery Cluster
nina.tuomikangas@vaasan.com
