Our new workshop concepts for co-creating solutions with our customers and partners are purpose-built for deep collaboration. These sessions, which can also be run virtually, have been very successful at bringing together the right people in the right place at the right time to innovate new sustainable packaging solutions.
Pooling our ideas and coming up with concepts in co-creation workshops with customers and partners gives us the chance to explore together and draw on the best of our skills and experiences to create something truly unique.
In our 'Performance clinic' we can help customers to optimise their materials and converting performance. With our 'Challenge us' concept a customer comes to us with a problem or development challenge and we work together to create a new package with, for example, better functionality, sustainability, or material performance. In an 'Explore the future' workshop we co-create new solutions for existing technologies – or even innovations for completely new technologies.
The Excellence Centre is a great platform to tap into the fantastic talent we have to offer in paperboard and packaging R&D and design, as well as our expertise in safety and sustainability and other topics like business intelligence.
As Customer Experience Manager my role is to coordinate everything, find the right people from the organisation to address their challenge and make sure that everything we do fits with the Metsä Board strategy and service concept. It's inspiring and rewarding to be able to take part in these co-creation projects. I get to hear first hand from customers about their needs and goals and then bring together the best possible team to address them.
This year hasn't been easy for any business because of the problems caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the restrictions everyone has been working under. But we've taken this as an opportunity instead of a challenge. Collaborative working is at the heart of everything we do so we needed to find new ways to bring together the right stakeholders and continue our development work. With the help of technology we're able to run our co-creation workshops as virtual sessions and even provide virtual tours of the facilities at the Excellence Centre for key customers and partners.
We've already run five successful workshops and twelve virtual tours – it's proving to be a great way to bring our customers and experts together to innovate and solve challenges, not to mention a wonderful showcase of our modern and ambitious approach to creating the sustainable packaging solutions of the future.
