Stim (Swedish collective management organisation for music creators and publishers) is an economic association working towards managing the financial interests of songwriters and music publishers. Their turnover is about 2bn Swedish SEK and they have 130 employees. In working towards continuously developing and improving the organisation they are using Stratsys’ tool for strategic planning.
The Challenge: To keep pace with industry digitalization
In line with the digitalization of the music industry at large, Stim needs to keep changing. Digitalization changes how music is created, distributed and consumed, which certainly affects Stim’s operations. They need to constantly change to keep pace with the industry and review and digitalize their processes continuously.
Stim licences the use of music to all actors who use music in their organisations, from the corner restaurant to large actors such as Youtube and Spotify. The organisation interacts with a wide variety of market actors, meaning they have a lot of projects running simultaneously. Considering this, a need for a structured planning and follow-up of activities has been identified.
”Digitalization has been a great challenge for us, working in the same pace as the industry. We also had a need for a structured planning tool, allowing us to prioritize based on the business plan.”
In his role as Head of Strategy, Nils is working towards developing the operations based on the priority issues. An obstacle he constantly must deal with are the amount of issues requiring his attention at any given time. Without a clear process of prioritising, maintaining focus and prioritising the right issues in the business plan is difficult.
What was the situation before Stratsys?
Before Stratsys, Stim used home-made solutions based on Excel and Powerpoint. The challenge with this way of working was the sheer amount of time spent planning, administering and following up data. It was also difficult to convey what was expected of the organisation in terms of follow-up and reporting.
The Solution: Increase availability with a common platform
”A key advantage of using Stratsys is that the time spent following up and compiling reports is a lot less than earlier. The tool has provided us with a common space to store information on our progress in terms of KPIs and other measurements.”
Nils believes the tool has increased in-house transparency and provided an overview that they previously lacked. The best thing about the system has been the flexibility and being able to adapt the platform to their changing needs and requirements.
What results have the Stratys implementation provided?
The response in Stim has been overall positive and their employees believe a tool providing transparency and clarity is a great thing.
”The tool has a user-friendly interface, which saves time. It also makes the information more available and thereby increases employee engagement.”
What is your advice to others about to embark on a digitization journey?
The number one fear Stim had going into the project was that the organisation would react with “not another system”. They therefore felt the need to clarify the purpose of the system and ensure that it would help resolve clear and identifiable needs.
”In order to succeed in change management, it is important to firstly understand and establish the needs of the organisation. We were very clear on explaining the purpose of implementing a new tool, since many employees are suffering from system fatigue these days.”
Stim has established a clear management system consisting of internal support, administrators and a system owner. Together these functions aid and assist the users in using the tool and help them extract the maximum benefit out of it.
”Once a month we for example host our ”planning meetup”, where everyone can ask questions and receive support. It’s an important success factor in our Stratsys use.”
Finally, Nils believes a key success factor is their ongoing in-house work rolling out Stratsys, constantly helping the users using the tool more effectively and continuously reinforcing the benefits to Stim.
