Mantena aims to become the Nordic region’s most customer-oriented and innovative provider of train equipment maintenance services. With this in mind, the current focus of the business is on skills building and continuous improvement.
Anyone who has worked with strategic processes knows how easy it is to set demanding goals, but they also recognise that it takes more than big words to make it become a reality. At Mantena the process of becoming the most customer-oriented and innovative supplier is well underway. To ensure that we achieve this goal, the company has initiated two strategic programs. One of these is the Operational Excellence Program (OEP).
Culture building
OEP is a strategic program designed to help organisations develop and implement solid operational processes. Acting CEO, Vidar Leirvik, says that for Mantena OEP is mainly about building culture.
“We want to create a culture throughout the company where the focus is on continuous improvement. For this we need a core base of knowledge, principles and attitudes that we can gather around. Programs like OEP help us to systematise our work and make it easier to work purposefully with efficiency and flow in our internal work processes. This is crucial to taking the business to a new level and achieving our goals.
Replenishing expertise
Even though we are currently in the middle of a second wave of the coronavirus and many are still working from home offices and on Teams, the internal improvement work is ongoing at Mantena. This autumn is being used to replenish the leadership’s skills.
“Our goal of becoming a leader in innovating and being customer-oriented, requires purposeful work over time. The beauty of OEP is the so-called train-the-trainer approach, where participants in the program train each other. The group management completed the first part of OEP in the spring of 2020 and they are now training other managers. Following that, the various managers will train their employees until spring 2021. So far, our experiences from this program have been overwhelmingly positive, and we look forward to this continuing,” says Leirvik.