LU-VE

LU-VE Group, one of the world's leading manufacturers of heat exchangers, had the following needs:

• Centralize the management of project ideas across the various plants
• Standardize the collection, selection and evaluation of employee proposals
• Monitor project progress across all functional areas
• Create a structured workflow to facilitate the transformation of ideas into concrete projects

Dinova supported the company in the implementation of Smartsheet and Control Center, obtaining:

• Predefined project templates with specific phases and predefined steps
• Facilità nell’attivare nuovi progetti e coinvolgere stakeholder
• Gantt charts to visually represent the phases and details of each project
• Simplified information sharing and improved collaboration between teams

With a global presence that includes 19 manufacturing facilities and a network of sales companies and representative offices in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Oceania, LU-VE needed a unified management system for employee project proposals. As always, people are at the heart of this company's success. Recognizing this, the company established a structured workflow to collect employee proposals, channel them through a formal evaluation process, and then transform the most promising ones into projects.

“Each company in the Group had its own way of collecting, structuring, and transforming employee ideas into projects,” explains Stefano Mongardi , Project Manager and Deployment Specialist at Dinova, who supported LU-VE in implementing Smartsheet. “Therefore, top management wasn't always clear on the progress of projects across different plants and functional areas to drive positive development.” The need for a unified strategy for collecting, selecting, evaluating, and sharing new ideas, and then initiating and managing approved projects, became even more evident after the acquisition of Alfa Laval's air heat exchanger division. “We decided that Smartsheet offered a good balance between support and guidance, and the freedom for project managers to customize the tool based on specific project needs,” said Alvio Bernard , IT Project Manager at LU-VE. As a Smartsheet Platinum Partner, Dinova was the natural choice to support the company in implementing Control Center.

Using Smartsheet and project management experience, a series of templates were created to cover all phases of the project, from planning to execution. These phases and their various details were represented in Gantt charts. "We created six categories for project design: products, production, supply chain, sales, marketing, and infrastructure," explained Ugo Ceppi , a consultant at LU-VE.

“For each of them, we assigned a category manager who knows how to manage their area in Smartsheet.” Each template contains specific phases, with mandatory steps and deliverables to be achieved. However, managers have the flexibility to add tasks, set the budget, and assign people responsible. “Managers can activate a project with just one click,” says Bernard . Mongardi adds: “From a simple sheet, they can create the project structure and easily involve stakeholders from different levels of the company.”

“Smartsheet ha cambiato il modo in cui le persone lavorano insieme”, afferma Ceppi. “I dipendenti di LU-VE sono entusiasti di usarlo perché vedono come li aiuta a condividere i compiti, a segnalare i progressi e a mantenere il controllo”.

Flexible and tailor-made solutions for optimized project management

Thanks to Dinova's experience and expertise, LU-VE was able to adopt Smartsheet and introduce a new way of managing projects within teams, increasing sharing and collaboration among employees. Ceppi's words are clear: "Dinova's support was essential because it helped us formulate the strategy and establish a workflow for collecting relevant data from the beginning. The team understood our use case, objectives, and business processes. We couldn't have done it alone." This collaboration was a success because it was driven by the intention to put people at the center , creating a virtuous ecosystem that values ​​skills and ideas.