Engage, Excite, Empower

Jebsen Industrial sees success in crowdsourcing for ideas from its people, facilitated by its new open innovation platform, JInnovate

Innovation is essential to succeed in today’s competitive business world. At Jebsen Industrial, innovation is encouraged as a way for the company to prepare for change and, more importantly, to lead change in the sectors that it serves. It believes that innovation can help solve problems, discover better ways of doing things and create greater value for its principals, customers and people.

And since its people are closest to the ground, dealing with day-to-day operational challenges and listening to what customers are saying, Jebsen Industrial believes that they are the richest source of ideas. JInnovate was launched as an open platform to encourage and empower its people to step forward with thoughts and suggestions. If their ideas are accepted, the contributor will be given the opportunity to lead the project and turn their vision into reality!

To engage, excite and empower its people, the JInnovate team visited six Jebsen Industrial offices from June 15-24. They organised workshops to introduce the programme and share its progress with colleagues. To date,16 suggestions have been received through JInnovate. About [8] have been endorsed and several are now close to project completion.

The first comes to fruition

Leading the wave of innovation is a project by Karen Leung and Ankie Siu from Building Product Business Line. Inspiration struck Karen when she attended a seminar by theand learnt about a software tool by Intec. She immediately saw how it could significantly reduce the time needed to prepare product catalogues and quotations for customers. Together with Ankie, she decided to submit the idea to JInnovate once it launched. Today, the Intec software has completed testing and is ready to be rolled out.

With the software, Karen can now complete the same tasks in just 30% of the time it used to take her. She uses the saved time to be more responsive to customer needs and to focus on driving sales. Jebsen Industrial estimates that that the software will save the company about HK0,000 each year, while supporting a more customer-centric work culture.

“This proactive and forward thinking behaviour is exactly what we want to see at Jebsen Industrial. Karen and Ankie’s project is a great showcase of the benefits of JInnovate,” said Managing Director Mr Maximilian von Stillfried, who also invited both of them to lunch. As the first contributors to JInnovate, Karen and Ankie have also been rewarded with a day off from work.

With JInnovate being off to such a great start, Jebsen Industrial is looking forward to more employees coming forward with new ideas. These will help the company become more agile and effective in serving its partners and customers while allowing its people to build their ideal working environment.