First company to receive ISO Innovation in Latin America
How MZF4 became the first company to receive ISO Innovation in Latin America
The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) published in July in Geneva, Switzerland, the ISO 56002 standard, which brings together the best practices in the area of business innovation. The certification was born after more than a decade of work, in efforts that included the compilation of contributions submitted by 163 countries.
Receiving this seal attests that the company’s management system complies with the best international practices in innovation and creativity. And that’s what happened on July 17, two days after the publication of the new standard, when MZF4 became the first company in Latin America to achieve certification. The company is part of the Mazzaferro Group, which manufactures threads and yarns used in activities such as fishing, industrial sewing, medicine and civil construction.
How did MZF4 manage to receive Innovation ISO (as the certification has been called)? Over the course of a year, the company divided its efforts into three fronts: fostering innovation, monitoring the idea generation processes and measuring results.
“For each of these fronts, we create communications, programs, different actions and we hope, by measuring the return to the business of our ideas, to reduce costs, increase sales volume and improve our customers’ satisfaction”, he says, in a statement, Fabricio Saad, responsible for marketing at Mazzaferro.
Below is a summary of the work done by MZF4 on each of these fronts:
1. Communicate to innovate
The work of internal communication, Inovateca, helped build a creative culture. This included producing content on innovation and creating a space to encourage the free exchange of ideas.
2. Ideas from all sides
The MZF4 team developed two different programs for the different publics of the company, which has around 200 employees: operational and tactical/strategic. eureka!, aimed at the team at the factories – located in São Paulo and Diadema (SP) -, involves awarding the best ideas for reducing costs, improving quality and revising industrial processes. At the tactical/strategic level, design thinking rounds invite employees to reflect on specific company problems. All ideas are evaluated according to criteria that involve ease of implementation, necessary investment, financial impact on the company, risks involved and reflections of this innovation on the market.
3. To measure, new rulers
Measuring the impact of an idea is not an ordinary task, and MZF4 has attested to this in practice. Thus, it was necessary to think of new performance indicators, the so-called KPIs. Among these indicators, for example, the analysis of the percentage of revenue and margin generated by innovative ideas, the number of disruptive ideas launched and implemented by business unit and the average amount of training in innovation per semester. An innovation management committee monitors the progress of these ideas, prioritizes investments and evaluates strategies, in addition to recognizing and rewarding the teams involved in the process. The company also created an innovation management committee (CGI), made up of market professionals specialized in reviewing the processes and flows that underlie innovation management.
Published on Vida de Empresa website in September 18th, 2019:
vidadeempresa.com.br/2019/09/18/como-a-mzf4-tornou-se-a-primeira-empresa-a-receber-o-iso-inovacao-na-al
