A very important part of the Swedish business is our service, since we provide measuring services to all our customers as a part of installed meters and loggers. This service means that measured values need to be be available to our customers at all times through a web-portal, web service and/or on demand through telephone or mail.
This commitment to making “measured values available at all times,” sets high demands on us, and on what we call our service platform, it makes planning ahead and anticipating problems before they happen extremely important. We live by this and are measured by it. We’re measured by our way of delivering service in a good, professional and safe order.
I’m very proud of how well we do this for our customers today, and even more proud of how well we have handled this through some big changes during the years – that’s quality!
When the office here in Stockholm became a part of the Secure group, it was moved to a better location in Kista, just outside Stockholm where most of the employees lived. We managed to change the location of the entire office and all it’s IT-equipment in the safest way possible while maintaining the high levels of service our customers are used to. In 2009 it was time for a change again – the layout of the new office was changed, to fit changing personnel needs. An unfortunate consequence of this particular change was that we lost the old server room. But again, we managed to maintain the service level throughout the changes being made.
In September this year we received some very bad news from our chosen internet service provider (ISP). In short, it meant that we immediately had to change our address again, but this time it was our address on the internet that needed to be changed. This would be a very small problem indeed if it weren’t for the fact that all old equipment installed in Sweden was programmed with the static IP-address to the office and the service platform. But yet again, we not only managed to go through a change without it affecting the customers, we actually made an opportunity out the problem! We contacted all installed units, but not simply to change the old address into a new one, instead we upgraded the software in such a way that we not only handled the present problem and solved it, we also looked ahead and made changes in such a way that future changes will be much easier to handle.
I liked the words used by Mike Batcheler when he visited us earlier this year, when he described the preferred way to tackle a problem, “to reframe the problem”. I think that expression so well describes what we did, and keep doing.
-Torben Karlsson