Metso

Metso is a frontrunner in providing sustainable technologies, end-to-end solutions and services for the aggregates, minerals processing and metals refining industries globally with operations in 50 countries. Metso’s Metals, the part of the company dealing with metals refining, designs, builds, operates, and maintains metal refining plants around the world by providing cutting-edge technology solutions.

The Metals business engaged Reaktor to strengthen the foundations for a digital transformation. The goal was to get an in-depth understanding of their current state and create an actionable roadmap for their digital offering, to ultimately grow revenues, increase safety, and save costs.

Metso’s Metals business area, like many other heavy industry organizations, faced the challenge of bringing together data and workflows from multiple areas of the business in order to optimize processes better. With the three different Metals business lines offering digital solutions for each of their segments separately, time and resources are spent catering to individual customers without an application to wider audiences. With more alignment in business lines and digital offerings, Metso’s Metals business area would be able to utilize its already existing collective wisdom even more efficiently. 

Metso’s Metals business area sought a partner who could help them make this transformation effectively. The goal was to dig deep into the organization by interviewing internal stakeholders and – most importantly – customers, to identify their needs and pain points and create a digital offering strategy with tangible action items that would function as Metso Metals’ north star through all digital development.

To ultimately get to designing a clear, actionable roadmap, our first challenge was to understand where Metso’s Metals business was at in terms of customer needs and pain points. We interviewed internal stakeholders as well as the clients to understand the current state. The group of interviewees included folks from metal refining plants across continents. 

Our goal was to get to the bottom of how the Metals businesses' customers see them as digital service providers. The big questions dug into Metals business lines’ current digital offering, their hopes for the future, and where true value could be created. The results showed significant potential and room for improvement in the areas of safety, quality, and efficiency. Safety, in particular, was a recurring theme. By getting employees away from the refining plants and toward remote operating and monitoring, the chances of accidents is significantly reduced.

We also conducted technical analysis to understand what Metso’s tech stack looks like currently, and what would be possible to integrate in the future. The tech team's role was to support the rest of the strategy work to ensure the suggestions we made were viable.

The primary objective for Metso’s Metals business in their digital offering development is to support the achievement of business goals and drive growth. From our analysis, we found few impactful key areas to improve upon. For example, safety was seen as a big issue. The team was keen to understand how digital solutions could get employees as far away from the physical processes as possible. Quality was also a key focus point – how it could be better monitored and, therefore, controlled. Thirdly, optimization, and particularly reducing human error, was an area that came up repeatedly throughout the analysis.

Another factor for consideration was digital adaptability and scaling expertise. It was important to ensure that the new data and tools could be understandable for all employees so that it could become a part of the daily work of all operators. Learning would need to be supported with a thorough transitioning period.

Metso’s Metals business area was looking for a partner to help them identify the very granular, tangible action items they could execute. Having an existing and fragmented set of digital solutions was confusing in the eyes of their customers, and previous attempts at unifying the offering hadn’t been successful. 

We created this digital strategy from an in-depth analysis of current offering and workflows. We provided the grounds for being able to make the right, data-driven decisions efficiently for building better digital solutions. The strategy can guide their work into the future, uncovering the North Star with a data-driven approach.

• Analysis of the current state
• Interviews with internal stakeholders and Metso’s Metals business area customers
• Technical analysis of the current tech stack
• Identifying opportunities for new workflows and areas of improvement
• A tangible roadmap with clear action items
• A digital strategy that can act as a North Star for developing digital solutions