Page 3 - Hedengren_annual_review_2019_final_EN
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CEO's review
"As part of developing our service and quality, we decid-
ed to centralize all our support services into the parent
company, and this change was carried out during 2019."
The year 2019 was quite successful, consisting of more successes concept and streamlined our consumer business activities. We be-
than failures. From the commercial perspective, the year was good, lieve that the coming year will be profitable for Direct again.
and we carried out many development projects for improving cus- During the year, we updated our enterprise resource planning sys-
tomer experience. We also made a fairly large structural change tem to a new version, and many qualitative development projects
to improve customer experience, quality and internal efficiency. were carried out in connection with the version change. Of these,
In addition to this, we launched new and renewed product groups the most critical ones were perhaps the reclamation and delivery
and solutions that are significant from the perspective of business process reforms. Through the reclamation process, we can tackle
operations. opportunities for growth more quickly and systematically, and with
Hedtec's year was quite good, and there were successes on a wide delivery process reforms we were already able to markedly improve
front. This naturally improved Hedtec's growth, and the perfor- the level of delivery reliability at the end of the year.
mance targets were exceeded by a considerable margin. In addition In 2019, we dissolved our pension foundation and moved the pen-
to commercial activities, Hedtec plays a leading role in developing sion liabilities to Mandatum Life Palvelut Oy. In connection with this,
building automation which is important to us. This development we wrote off approximately € 740,000 as a one-off cost as well as
work has progressed well, and we have already carried out a few approximately € 320,000 as deferred tax levied on the 2019 result.
projects. There are also significant pilot projects underway. As part of developing our service and quality, we decided in 2018 to
Security's business activities have developed commendably in Nor- centralize all our support services to the parent company, and this
way and well in Sweden. In Norway, we have made company acqui- change was carried out during 2019. We believe that by managing
sitions, and the organization has grown as a result of the business. and developing service processes in a centralized way we can serve
The growth in Swedish operations has not met our targets, and this our customers better and produce our services more efficiently. This
caused slightly more costs than planned. In regard to export, sales is also the prerequisite for being able to achieve the growth targets
to Great Britain did not meet our expectations. In Finland, we had for our international operations. Based on experience, we can con-
some difficulty to get started at the beginning of the year. The launch clude that the change has been successful, our service levels have
of renewed products did not go exactly to plan. However, the de- improved, and our development projects are advancing more rap-
velopment of service sales continued to be positive, and develop- idly and less painfully.
ing the selling of services will be one of the central areas of focus in In 2019, we also launched a new digital service channel. In the com-
the coming years for the entire group. Security's good final spurt ing years, the service channel will be at the core of our marketing
in selling was not quite good enough to raise the turnover for the strategy. Big leaps for 2020 will be the introduction of the service
whole year to its target level. Even though the speed of growth has channel in Sweden and also in Norway at a later stage. The market
not been as planned, Security's improvement in performance level conditions in the coming years are not in our hands. However, the
was significant and exceeded the targets set for the business area, achievements for 2019 ensure that our competitiveness has im-
which shows that our activities are on the right track. proved and that, despite the market situation, we are in a better po-
With regard to Direct, we were forced to take action during the year, sition to grow our business profitably.
as it turned out that the development plans and investments did Marek Hintze
not lead to the desired outcome. We decided to abandon our B2B
3 OY HEDENGREN AB I ANNUAL REVIEW 2019