Innovations flourish in the alliance model

The alliances of the Tampere Tramway and the Lapland Central Hospital expansion have created several innovations. Ideas sprout because in an alliance project, everyone is working towards a common goal.

“Currently, the number of innovations in the Tampere Tramway alliance is 930, of which 433 have been executed and 192 that are approved and waiting to be executed. You won’t get even close to these kinds of numbers in a traditional project model. For instance, if a contractor in a traditional project comes up with a money-saving idea, next they will wonder if sharing and later putting the idea into practice will decrease the contract value. It can also be contended if ideas and innovations are in accordance with the contract or if they change the customer’s original concept of the project,” says Kari Simonen, Production Manager of the Tampere Tramway Alliance at YIT.

Ideas are collected constantly, and the best idea – or sometimes two – are awarded once a month. In addition, all the ideas of the week are distributed to everyone working in the alliance in a weekly newsletter. The Tampere Tramway project awards the best ideas with gift certificates to shops along the tramway route. This way, the project also supports local entrepreneurs whose daily life and business are affected by the construction project.

Simonen says that ideas come from all areas of expertise. The idea can be a technical tool used to do the work better, a way to organise traffic more smoothly or it can be related to communications, for instance. Awarded ideas include a template that helps the work procedure for pipes going into a distribution board and a method that facilitates the installation of a curbside inlet near the curb stones.

In the Lapland Central Hospital expansion project, innovating is picking up speed but great results have already been achieved.  The plan was to replace the old civil defence shelters of the hospital with new ones.

“A significant individual design and planning innovation made it possible to continue the use of the old civil defence shelters, which crucially decreased the need for new civil defence shelters. The innovation created a cost saving of several hundreds of thousands of euros in the target cost,” says Janne Keskinarkaus, Project Director at the Lapland Hospital District.

For further information, please contact:

Jarkko Salmenoja, Head of Division, Traffic infrastructure, tel. +358 (0)40 356 7057, jarkko.salmenoja@yit.fi

Janne Kananen, Project Development Manager, tel. +358 (0)40 631 8181, janne.kananen@yit.fi

Pirita Tiusanen, Communications Manager, YIT Corporation, tel. +358 (0)44 240 9822, pirita.tiusanen@yit.fi

YIT is the largest Finnish and significant North European construction company and urban developer. We develop and build apartments and living services, business premises and entire areas. We are also specialised in demanding infrastructure construction. Together with our customers, our nearly 8,000 professionals are creating more functional, attractive and sustainable cities and environments. We operate in 10 countries: Finland, Russia, Sweden, Norway, the Baltic countries, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. Our revenue in 2019 was approximately EUR 3.4 billion. YIT Corporation's share is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Oy. www.yitgroup.com