Tackling Challenges Together

Dura Vermeer is an independent family business with activities in the fields of housing, utility construction and infrastructure. With €1.5 billion in turnover and 3,500 employees, they are in the top ten companies within the Dutch construction industry.


The company is no stranger to innovation. They had achieved success with another platform and were now looking to upgrade their capability. As a result, Dura Vermeer decided to look for a new ideation partner to enable the continued growth of their innovation strategy.

Dura Vermeer Logo

Location

Rotterdam, Netherlands

Industry

Needs

The Challenge

The Solution

The organization reviewed several solution providers and decided to use edison365, as the software is easy to use and install, and fully integrates into their existing Microsoft ecosystem.


edison365ideas is designed to enable the crowdsourcing of ideas and encourage collaboration across teams, while edison365businesscase will allow Dura Vermeer to rapidly evaluate the potential benefits of any suggestions collected.

construction site silhouettes

“We launched our first campaign in August, which ran for 8 weeks on several topics. We collected 236 ideas and we’re really happy with that. Part of that is the ease of use for users; it’s really convenient to get people online.”

– Innovation Manager at Dura Vermeer.

Results

After working with edison365’s Professional Services team, Dura Vermeer have found the onboarding of admins and platform users easy, quick and seamless.

They have begun to use the audience functionality within the edison365ideas platform to tackle group-wide challenges. This has enabled them to create a company-wide ‘knowledge base’ which brings the whole organization together.

The organization launched their first ideas campaign in summer 2021, which ran for 8 weeks and covered topics including circularity, zero emissions, smarter construction, and data and algorithms. These topics were specifically chosen because they have an effect on all sections of the company and enable teams to look at the same issue using their own areas of expertise. As a result, Dura Vermeer collected over 230 ideas and saw engagement from nearly a thousand employees.

Of these ideas, over 50 have been marked as “qualified” and the organization is planning to investigate them further.

Want to know more about this implementation

Future Plans

The team plans to create a recurring large, company-wide challenge, and several smaller (department, entity or project-based) challenges each year.

Dura Vermeer are planning to use edison365businesscase to build out qualified ideas that would have an impact on the entire group into more detailed propositions with the ability to transform the business.

construction worker pouring wet concret road construction site

They are also looking into using data pulled from edison365 into Power BI to create a portfolio view – enabling them to monitor the areas of the company where there is less engagement, as well as the maturity of ideas collected in each challenge.

They also have ambitions to use open innovation to collaborate with external organizations – such as universities – and bring in their expertise on topics such as the environment.

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