Supporting the customer order journey to make lives easier — Nickie Vilmer

Finding the smartest way to do things

Nickie was working from home for years before it became the global trend we know of today. This came about because in 2016, just three years after she had joined Symetri, Nickie was a vital link in moving enormous amounts of data from our legacy, standalone, ERP and CRM systems, onto a new integrated platform.

“The Symetri management team were really accommodating with what we all believed to be the smartest way to tackle the data migration challenge, and they gave me the space I needed to focus one hundred per cent on the task”, says Nickie. Her previous commute to the office had taken up around three hours a day and it was clear to the whole team that this was just a waste of time, as well as being physically draining for Nickie.

The resulting single platform still exists today as the heart of contract renewals for customers across Denmark, Finland, Sweden, and Norway. Nickie heads a team of six others, working across national borders from the now unified database.

“Before this system, we had to cut and paste from ERP to CRM and vice versa”, says Nickie. “Each country was also working independently, and this meant that many tasks were being duplicated. It runs like clockwork today, not least because so much of the order-to-contract workflow is highly automated. It’s now a lean way of working.

The systems take care of the tedious repetitive stuff, so the team can spend more quality time on solving problems for customers when exceptions arise”.

“We’re geeks, and we love it”

Nickie’s background was in technical design, using Autodesk products both in the building sector and in manufacturing. She had become a fan of so many of the applications she had been using that when the opportunity to work with Symetri came up, Nickie felt there was a natural fit. “Symetri felt the same too. I joined in 2013, and things really have just carried on getting better and better ever since”.

Nickie says that she is a self-professed ‘geek’ along with most of her team. They enjoy solving problems, fine-tuning systems to make the next step in a process easier, evaluating workflows to find the most efficient connections between stages in a process.

Nickie says this is all about optimising processes, but adds a caveat: “Process is what keeps wheels turning, but the role of the human is about keeping them turning in the right direction. Feedback at Symetri is always forthcoming.

More importantly to the team, appreciation is what spurs us on. We so often receive thanks from people across Symetri for the work we do. People on the Symetri team make us feel special and that’s such a great reward. This sense of togetherness creates a super feeling of belonging – to a bigger effort, a wider community, and an audience of users who will always take time out of their day to acknowledge what we do”.

Everybody wins

While the big database change-over some years back was a momentous challenge, Nickie says that the excitement of such pioneering projects as that has not waned. “This feeling at Symetri that we can all do better and that we will all do better is something that’s never turned off. You can call it ‘collective dynamism’. Everybody’s hungry to learn. Part of my job is about training the team, and taking good care of their career progress, but I’m also learning all the time.

My manager is a star. He always takes as much time as is needed to encourage me, and guide me. This creates a sort of ripple effect. The more that people give you, the more you want to give to others. I’m not just talking about me and my team; the sharing philosophy runs across all teams and all countries in the Symetri family.

Now we’ve all adapted to working from home, the feeling spreads. We are always there for each other. I truly believe that the outward-facing impact of a culture like ours is that we’re always there for our customers. Everybody wins”.