In any modern tech-driven business, swift innovation and adapting to evolving market dynamics are cornerstones of sustained success. While well-established enterprises and burgeoning startups are at opposite ends of the business spectrum, joint efforts can often yield remarkable results.
The global technology startup ecosystem raises annually hundreds of billions in funding, highlighting the startup community's immense potential. Recognizing startups' inherent agility and creativity, Konecranes employs emerging startups’ expertise and perspectives to enrich its offering with new innovative customer solutions and to support its ability to scale technology innovations.
The benefit is mutual
As much as Konecranes gets great opportunities from collaborating, Konecranes Partnership Manager Ville Hoppu shares that collaboration provides startups a great growth opportunity. “Our support can enable startups to explore their ideas much quicker, with less risk, reduced costs, and test their technology in an industry-relevant environment. In addition, startups get an access to our large customer base, networks and service chain,” Hoppu tells.
One of the areas where Konecranes has collaborated with startup companies is data management. Today’s manufacturing industry handles huge amounts of data on daily basis, and this can easily become a nightmare for data maintenance personnel. Data quality is also crucial in artificial intelligence because it directly impacts the performance, accuracy, and reliability of AI models. High-quality data enables AI models to make more accurate predictions, leading to more reliable outcomes.
“Typically, collaboration starts with us identifying a need in our operations or during concept development. Together with a startup, we start to create a concept and see how their solution could fit our needs. Based on the maturity of the product or solution, we do a proof of concept and test it together,” Hoppu says.
As per lean culture, not all ideas move forward in development. “We continuously scout interesting new companies and try to find areas where we could test proof of concepts that would enhance the features or functionalities of our offering. Collaborations can relate to both customer solutions but also internal processes and ways of working,” Hoppu adds.
Letting the data do the heavy lifting
Since 2019, Konecranes has partnered with Tikean, a Finnish company providing data management platforms, to create an innovative data management solution to monitor and measure corporate data quality and provide visibility to the data flows across the operative systems used by business.
Konecranes’ deep experience with utilizing data at the core of the business made it clear that there could be significant savings in terms of time, effort, quality, and costs from good quality data. To achieve fluent capabilities in global processes and add further value for customers, Konecranes took a deep dive into enhancing its delivery process with Tikean.
“Collaboration provided us the capability to monitor complex and hierarchical production data in and between the product data management and enterprise resource planning systems. Now we can see how global and local data link with each other and how to measure it as a daily routine,” Konecranes Head of Master Data Management, Aino Parviainen says.
The improvements in data management and processes have resulted in concrete time, effort and cost savings, and, most importantly, enabled Konecranes to serve customers better and in a timely manner with more consistent quality.
“One of the cool things about today’s data quality management is that now we can easily and effortlessly define the new data sources, data models, and the needed quality rules with no coding at all. Instead of weeks of waiting, we can assign the rules and reporting needs ad-hoc. This makes our daily work so much faster and easier. And business likes it.”
“Konecranes has been an invaluable partner for us. Their input from real-life business requirements and processes has steered our development and helped the solution create instant business benefits. And it’s great to see that even the non-data business users really like and own it,” Tikean CEO, Jouko Eronen says.
Constantly looking for new collaboration opportunities
In concrete efforts to connect and collaborate with startups, Konecranes has established several ongoing projects: Zero4, REACH, and Discovery that offer different collaboration models for companies. Konecranes is constantly seeking new product and service innovations and capabilities which span not only products but also the processes and platforms used to run the business.
“We were among the first large companies in Finland to host hackathons, and today we have established partnerships with innovation networks and start-up ecosystems and incubators such as Maria 01 that help us find promising new companies to collaborate with,” Hoppu says.
”While we are strongly prioritizing digitalization, we are also very interested in software and hardware solutions, even something like the packaging; anything that shows promise in scalability and helps us achieve our strategic targets,” Hoppu concludes.
More information on Konecranes’ startup collaboration here.
Zero4 is a publicly funded research-based innovation collaboration and ecosystem-building program. It aims to speed up experiments with the companies and their technologies, unlock fresh ideas, and give new angles to a wide range of applications within Konecranes’ offerings. REACH serves as an ongoing open call for startups to approach Konecranes for collaboration. Discovery is a solution-scouting track for when Konecranes has identified promising startups that can help fast-track innovative solutions. All of these enable maximizing business impact and minimizing time to value in collaboration between Konecranes and best-in-class startups.
