Co-creating a Brighter Future

How Signify uses Viima for collaborative and creative ideation

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About Signify

Industry: Lighting  Size: 37 000 employees   Location: 70 countries

Signify is the world leader in lighting for professionals, consumers, and the Internet of Things.  With approximately 37,000 employees worldwide, and a presence in 70 countries, Signify is unlocking the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world.

For the past 125 years Signify has pioneered breakthroughs in lighting and has been the driving force for many innovations. 

In brief, the outcomes of a a systematic use of Viima at Signify:

  • improved interaction and communication
  • over 1700 ideas from 180 suppliers
  • 30% more opportunities than with previous solution
  • higher engagement in the ideation process
  • simplified, cross-functional, processes
  • effortless idea management 

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SEED Supplier Collaboration Program


The urgent demand for environmental stewardship brought about not just challenges, but also a wide array of opportunities for sustainable, innovative solutions. Signify has been at the forefront of innovation in the lighting industry for years. Their innovations, such as LiFi – internet connectivity through light – and UV-C, solar and horticultural lighting, contribute to a safer, smarter, more sustainable world. 
 
To stay on top of their game and continue their innovation work, Signify promotes cross-functional collaboration during product and process development by leveraging the knowledge and insights of stakeholders.

They achieve this through SEED (Supplier Early Engagement Days), a collaboration program, where they leverage their suppliers' knowledge, expertise, and insights on the latest technology trends to generate ideas for the running portfolios and take out unrewarded complexity.

The SEED program is an exclusive and collaborative initiative,  aimed at creative ideation, where only the best suppliers are selected and invited to participate. The global program is running in 11 locations covering roughly a 1B € spend. It culminates in the SEED Convention, a series of regional content-sharing sessions, where Signify leadership and suppliers discuss results, business updates and future actions.

 

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Signify Challenge

The annual SEED program kicks-off with a 6-week idea collection campaign where 180 selected suppliers brainstorm ideas on cost reductions, value increase, changes in operations, new product concepts and more. 

This global collaboration process empowers both parties to innovate, but it also comes with a set of challenges. Managing and measuring thousands of data points is highly demanding.

As the program scaled up, ideas could no longer be collected in simple Excel Workbooks. The ideation process was becoming clunkier, leading to two main issues: version control and feedback loops.

It was frustrating for both suppliers and Signify teams who were losing tremendous opportunities.

To scale their innovation activities, Signify needed a better solution, a tool that could provide flexibility, scalability and allow cross-functional collaboration between hundreds of stakeholders outside their organization.

The Perfect Solution for Signify

Viima ticked all the right boxes. It allowed direct feedback from multiple people in different locations, who could further comment, vote, and explain ideas by adding pictures and documents. They could do it from their desks, or from remote locations, through Viima's mobile app.

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Collaboration
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Effortless Management
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Customizable Ideation
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High Engagement

 

In 2022 Signify started looking for a solution that could significantly improve the collaboration with their suppliers, and also enable them to broaden the scope of their work to allow for a cross-functional approach to ideation.

After extensive market scouting, Signify found Viima, a simple, effortless, but powerful digital ideation tool.

Viima proved to be the perfect solution, as it easily scaled with their needs, allowing 180 suppliers and their 800 employees from around the world to participate in the SEED program. 

What's more, it was effortless to setup and easy to understand, so suppliers were happy to get Viima into use right away. In the first months it has already drastically improved the interaction and made the ideation fluid so suppliers were able to focus on what mattered the most, ideas!
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Signify results

The ease of use enabled a fast adoption, and allowed participants to build on top of each other's ideas, enhancing the cross-functional collaboration that Signify was interested in growing.

Only months after Viima was taken into use, Signify witnessed a 30% increase in the number of opportunities captured in the idea collection phase of their SEED program. 180 suppliers generated over 1700 ideas, which made the 2022 SEED Convention the most successful so far.

The great success is attributed to a systematic process of collecting and managing ideas. With the use of Viima boards, Signify was able to seamlessly scale their process globally, to share and reinforce best practices with selected suppliers from 11 locations. Each supplier had their own board where they could unleash their creativity.

This is how they managed to create value that led to cost reductions, changes in operations, and new product concepts. Viima received an NPS of 53, proving the satisfaction of all those using the tool for the first time.

Signify continues to use Viima for their SEED program, but has also identified other areas of use, which further simplified and improved internal processes and operations.

 

Viima takes great pride in enabling innovation in forward-thinking organizations, like Signify.

You too, can drive more innovation in your organization! Whether you are advanced innovators, or just getting started, Viima can help you excel. Find out how. Book a demo today!

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Joris
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Viima immediately resolved the indirect communication in our ideation process and changed it into ‘live’ collaborative ideation from any location.

In the first trials, not only the early adopters but also the laggards joined and tried out Viima on their mobile phones. This is a statement of the simplicity the solution offers.

The combination of Viima, our suppliers, and the Signify team allowed the fantastic outcome of SEED 2022.

Joris Uytterhoeven
DfX Manager Europe - Signify
Arnold Chatelain - Signify
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We were looking for an application to support our ideation process with our suppliers: easy to use, everywhere, every time, collaborative and affordable.

We found Viima. The great results talk for themselves. Our suppliers like it.

Arnold Chatelain
Transformation Program Director - Signify

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