A New Chapter in Fortaco Journey

Mika Mahlberg (M.Sc. Engineering) has been appointed Chief Operating Officer (COO) from 1 November 2024, and as of 1 January 2025, Mika will be Interim President & CEO. We warmly welcome Mika to his new position and wish him the best of success in supporting the Fortaco journey!
 
Lars Hellberg, President & CEO of Fortaco Group has decided to retire on 1 January 2025. Lars will continue cooperation as a member of Fortaco’s Supervisory Board. The owner and Supervisory Board express their sincere thanks and appreciation to Lars for dedication and leadership during his 11 years and look forward to the cooperation with Lars as the supervisory board member.
 
Before joining Fortaco, Mika worked as an independent consultant and a strategic advisor. He spent 26 years at Konecranes, a global leader in material handling solutions. He held several leadership positions, including Executive Vice President and Head of Business Area Port Solutions, as well as Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Port Cranes.
 
Mika brings experience in leading international businesses and has a deep understanding of Fortaco’s markets and our customers' needs.
 
This autumn, I have had the privilege of working closely with Lars and the Fortaco team to refine the company’s strategy for maintaining its leading position within the off-highway industry. I look forward to building on the solid foundation established and supporting Fortaco's next strategic steps,” Mika says.  
 
Lars’ dedication and 11 years of leadership guided Fortaco on its' way to be the leading strategic partner to OEM customers in the off-highway equipment industries worldwide.
 
“My 11 years at Fortaco as President & CEO is a true, fun, and great learning experience. I am proudly reflecting on what our customers and business partners have built together with the Fortaco team, and I am looking forward to joining Fortaco’s Supervisory Board as a continuation of being a member of the Fortaco family. I wish Mika every success in his new role”, says Lars.


Fortaco Gliwice: Innovation in Steel Processing and Beyond Best-in-Class Efficiency

If you think operations like cutting, bending, and shipping are too basic for innovation, then you need to visit Fortaco’s Gliwice business site.

Strike up the band

Silesia, a region of about 40,000 square kilometers that lies mostly within Poland, but also the Czech Republic and Germany, has one of Europe's richest industrial pedigrees. Rich in minerals and natural resources, including a coalfield of 4,500 square kilometers. It has been mined since the 18th century, and the region is synonymous with heavy industry. It is only natural that a steel fabricator like Fortaco would have a home here.

On October 3rd, 2024, Fortaco inaugurated its Gliwice business site. In keeping with Silesian tradition, the opening ceremony included a performance by the Knurów City Mining Orchestra, the majorettes of Scarlet Knurów, and was followed by a tree-planting ceremony and ribbon cutting. It was a succession of old traditions, brought out to honor the region’s newest, Fortaco’s Gliwice business site, the very first business to open in Knurów’s Economic Zone.

Ribbon cutting. From left to right: Lars Hellberg, Jarosław Szytow, Rafał Maćkowski, Head of Investors Support Department, Katowice Special Economic Zone Co., and Tomasz Rzepa, President of Knurów.
Only in Silesia? The majorettes of Scarlet Knurów help open Fortaco’s Gliwice business site.

Important in Gliwice, Important in Fortaco

“The original conception of this business site was to make ready-to-weld components that we'd previously outsourced to several suppliers or were being produced at our Wrocław plants,” says Jarosław Szytow, General Manager of Fortaco Gliwice. “We are able to both gain knowledge and increase efficiency in the company.”

And efficiencies in one Fortaco plant are passed down the line to others. At Gliwice, steel components are fiber laser-, plasma-, and oxygen cut, press bent, and milled on CNC machines. AI tools are used, and 3D scanners employed for a very fast Production Part Approval Process (PPAP). The supply chain is improved by kitting operation and shipping, in the beginning, directly to the welding stations in Fortaco’s operations in Janów Lubelski and Wrocław. Even in an industrial area like Silesia, welders are hard to find and expensive. Efficiency matters.

All of this is done in a 35,000-square-meter building, a greenfield project that will employ 250 when ramp-up is complete. But that is only the beginning. "We will eventually process 40,000 tons of steel in this plant,” says Szytow. “In 2025, we’ll add a robot welding line to produce advanced steel structures. Fortaco Gliwice will bring a lot of pioneering solutions to the off-highway industry.”

Soon to be filled with machines and people. Part of Fortaco Gliwice’s 35,000 square meters.
Fortaco’s Logistics Manager Małgorzata (Gosia) Lesisz and GM Jarosław Szytow.
The combination of power and precision in the most modern presses allows for achieving impressive performance.

Innovation beyond production

Mention robot welding and it’s easy to conclude that Fortaco’s Gliwice business site is state of the art. But robots are just part of the process, and it is of equal, if not greater importance, that innovation is found in other key aspects of business. At the Gliwice business site, innovation comes from everywhere.

As components are cut, bent, and milled, they are kitted on custom-made pallets, which are shipped directly to the production line in other Fortaco plants. Jan Olovsson, Fortaco’s supply chain expert, has worked with the Fortaco team to make the facility’s logistics state of the art. “Welders are a scarce resource, so what we do here helps optimize their labor in other factories.” Olovsson characterizes it as constant experimentation and innovation in the name of efficiency. “We don’t yet have the production numbers to tell you what the gains are,” he says. “But we believe, and our experience shows, that this way of working is the path to the highest efficiency.”

The most innovative ERP

Innovation is also present in the way Gliwice approached its ERP system. It is using a brand new SAP S/4HANA cloud solution. "Not only does a cloud solution mean you don't acquire hardware and a data center, but it's safest place to keep your data," says Piotr Galiński, Fortaco Group's IT Director. But choosing the right tool is only the start. You have to get the systems up and running. And that's extremely challenging with greenfield projects.

"Greenfield development typically takes one-and-a-half to two years," says Galiński. “And the Gliwice factory was only on paper in 2022! Without an actual factory we had to decide how material would be moved, what devices and processes to employ. We had Jarosław the GM and one technical guy. And then we hired Gosia." Gosia, or Małgorzata Lesisz, came on board as Logistics Manager. With Lesisz taking the lead, the team went live with full SAP functionality after a mere five months.

“How could we do it?” asks Galiński. “Because of the team that Jarosław built. We had hundreds of decisions to make, discussions based only on our imaginations. Everybody had to imagine how the process would look like."

Lesisz compares the planning and decision process to childbirth. “This factory is a child which has been born. Now we have to raise it.” The child will be raised with what she calls a planet passionate approach. “For example, we're using an electro-permanent magnetic traverse for internal transport. These planet passionate solutions in our supply chain and logistics process are the most modern available. This means not only efficiency, but a high level of safety.”

‘Greenfield’ is the magic word

Silesia’s industrial history means that it is a magnet for skilled workers, engineers, and other manufacturing professionals. It also means that the region’s unemployment rate is approximately two percent. So how does Fortaco compete for the 250 team members it is eventually going to need?

Greenfield is the magic word,” says Jarosław Szytow. “In this region everyone who wants a job has a job. As GM, I have to create a feeling of importance in the work. Because the sense of importance attracts people with passion, and from passion come professionalism. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, whether cleaning or operating a machine, both are important.” Szytow says the team will be composed of highly experienced people but also welcoming to those with less experience who want to develop their skills. “Highly experienced people are needed for a quick ramp-up. If you have only fresh people, it can take one to two years to ship product. We have one experienced person and two or three new ones on every team. There’s a transfer of knowledge. It means teamwork is critical. We promote it from the very first day.”

So if Fortaco builds it, will the workers come? They are already, in fact, says Agnieszka Koziara, Senior Vice President People & HR at Fortaco Group. “What we’re hearing is that we’re attracting automotive workers in the region, because our work is very interesting and they find Fortaco has an automotive culture where they feel at home. Fortaco’s top priority is safety, quality based on the Toyota Way, with whom we have partnership.”

Forty-thousand tons of steel will eventually pass through Fortaco’s Gliwice business site. Workers, honored guests, Fortaco managers, and the Knurów City Mining Orchestra pose in front of the 35,000-square-meter facility.

80 tons of steel

To start with, Fortaco’s Gliwice business site will produce 8,000 new product implementations through summer 2025. “Sometimes we supply a piece of cut metal,” says GM Szytow. “Other times we’re producing something extremely complicated. It’s not massive production, so we have to be very flexible with our production processes. You’ll notice very wide corridors between our machines on the factory floor. That’s because the parts we make range from less than a single kilo to more than five tons in weight! We have to accommodate everything.”

Szytow sees the business as a logistics hub, rather than only production. “At our peak, we’ll have 12 trucks arriving each day with steel sheets and more than a dozen trucks leaving with finished goods. Greenfield is a blank canvas. We will write our futures together.”

Lars Hellberg, Fortaco Group President & CEO, is ready to that and has pen in hand. “We've grown significantly over ten years, and we're known in the market," he says. "Fortaco processes 80,000 tons of steel, and at that quantity it is beneficial to centralize 50 percent of the annual consumption at Gliwice, while the remainder is managed by Fortaco Estonia or through outsourcing. With the technology we're installing in Gliwice, we can automate processes even further, deliver high quality parts that improve welding robot accuracy, and make things overall more accurate and safer at the same time. Mills used to deliver steel plates to four Fortaco locations. Now, with Gliwice, we can narrow that to two. It all plays into efficiency."

In 2014, before the economic downturn, Hellberg speculated that Fortaco would become a billion-euro company. “At the present time, I'm not saying that's wrong,” Hellberg smiles. “As a group we've got ambitious plans for growth. And I believe we'll get there.”

Lars Hellberg, Fortaco Group President & CEO.

Fortaco’s Crusader for ‘Why?’

Andrzej Wrona, Fortaco Group’s Operations Development Director, loves to ask why. He’d like you to do it, too.

After graduating university as a mechanical engineer, Andrzej Wrona's first job was in a company that supplied airbags to the automotive industry. He was asked to participate in continuous improvement programs, invited to Six Sigma, but his bosses never shared the big picture. The company had lean practitioners who played simulation games. "We referred to them as the Entertainment Department," he laughs. "It was a very mechanistic approach. I did what was asked, but nobody ever told me why." 

After a few years he moved on to Wärtsilä, which was just beginning to set up a lean program. "Since I came from that environment, and because we were supported by Professor Peter Hines, whose career was dedicated to understanding the true lean, I asked if I could join." In the Wärtsilä culture, he learned why. "I understood that true lean is enabling people, getting a bottom-up commitment. That's what I'd been missing before." He studied the Toyota Way and learned that asking why was essential. "I loved that we were invited to question everything. Why are we using such a heavy tool for testing? Why are there missing parts for product assembly? Why do we have to spend time correcting the product?"

Small steps, big impact

From Toyota he learned that small improvements made every day can amount to major improvements. "Sometimes we have big dreams that never come true, but consistent small steps can have big impact. An organization is like an iceberg. Above water are the processes you can see, but what's below is the culture. If it's a good culture, then middle managers and production heads are very interested in what people on the line have to say."

Wrona is a big fan of Toyota kata. "Kata is a Japanese word meaning form. In martial arts, it's about practicing a set of movements until you become perfect. Say you have the goal to produce 10 pieces per week instead of four. The Toyota philosophy says give people the goal, then have reviews. Ask what experiments they did. Did they make progress? How much? What else could we try? It's not about having a clear action plan that could lead you where you don't want to be. It's one action at a time. You see how it goes. If it's not helping, you do something else!"

The 1 a.m. message

One day when Wrona was at work in 2013, Lars Hellberg, who had left Wärtsilä to run Fortaco, invited the Wärtsilä team to Fortaco to talk about their lean journey. "I pushed my superior to be in this meeting and I met all the reps from Fortaco sites. I saw that they were just beginning to think about how to build a lean program, which I'd been doing for five years at Wärtsilä. A couple of weeks later, I was changing planes in Sweden and thought of Lars. I sent him a LinkedIn message at one o’clock in the morning, asking if he needed any help. He called me the next morning."

On March 1, 2014, Andrzej Wrona began work at Fortaco.

Let people play

Fortaco's Operations Development team is seven members strong today, and it is active with all Fortaco factories, though not always with direct support. It also carries out group-level projects, and supports new factories, such as the greenfield project in Gilwice, Poland.

"Fortaco Group's acquisitions mean that we have a lot of new colleagues, new regions, new cultures, and new technologies," says Wrona. “Every business unit is different when it comes to volume and product complexity, and when it comes to lean each has a different level of maturity. We need to develop an appropriate approach for each site. Our job is to explain why. People will implement something if you ask them, but if they know why then it makes all the difference."

Wrona’s leadership style seems to be a good fit in a modern Fortaco organization which is a merger of many cultures. “I hate micromanagement,” he says. “Like when you have top management talking about the color of the floor. I can’t tell my teammates how to make an app. I tell them the direction, the priorities, and I make sure they’re not overloaded with work, because multitasking is a fight, not development."

The Toyota Way

Key in building a lean culture has been Fortaco's collaboration with Toyota. "Toyota UK has a charity program where you pay a reasonable price per person whom you send to their UK factory to learn about the culture of seeking value. All that money goes to a children's charity. We've sent over 100 people over the years. Toyota even came to our Holič factory to teach us their approach to problem solving on a challenge we’re struggling with. Everyone who works with Toyota comes away with the understanding that knowledge is in the people, and you just have to create an environment that allows them to make things better."

Wrona is extremely proud of his team, as well as the entire Fortaco organization, for what they've been able to accomplish with this philosophy. In addition to the Kaizen culture, the OD team is pushing Fortaco to become digital. He says Fortaco's progress with digitalization is partly a result of Covid when travel came to a halt. "We couldn’t go anywhere, so we started developing apps. It was just a trial, but now we have three full-time app developers. Top management at the business sites are big believers in what we do, and thanks to their support we've seen results in financials.

The future Fortaco?

If you ask Wrona to predict the future, he’ll quote the motto of the OD department: Make tomorrow safer and better. “Everyone has two jobs. One is their daily job, and the other is to improve their daily job. How do we do things differently and reduce losses? We want to challenge the status quo.”

He believes the current generation of people joining Fortaco has a different outlook than his generation. “They’re not the type to take a job if they don’t understand their place in the bigger picture. It’s in their nature to ask why. Today's schools are producing Instagram people rather than welders. Robotization and AI are very interesting for today's graduates.” These young people can be partly credited with the drive to automate at Fortaco. Wrona sees this as an opportunity. After all, if you want to make something better, just ask the people.


Meet Our Premium Guest

Join Ari Vatanen at Subcontracting Trade Fair next week.

Ari will be sharing his experiences in business and rally and why he has decided to be a part of the Fortaco journey. You can meet him at our stand on 1-3 October.

Ari joined the Fortaco team in 2022 when he became an ambassador for Fortaco. Sharing the same values, always pushing the limits in a car and business, and looking at how to improve performance has been a great match for everyone.

Fortaco aims to be a premium service and product provider for our customers, and having Ari Vatanen onboard is well-aligned and an exciting chance for cooperation.

We are excited to spend the coming days with Ari and warmly welcome you to have a chat and a cup of coffee with him!


Gathering of industry leaders in Tampere

Autumn is here and so will soon be Subcontracting Trade Fair.

Welcome to meet Team Fortaco at the annual Subcontracting Trade Fair in Tampere on 1-3 October. Have a chat with our professionals and let us explore how Fortaco can support your business on its journey to success.

The event venue is the Tampere Exhibition and Sports Center, and you can find our team at the stand A 630.

For three days, Subcontracting Trade Fair, Finland’s leading industrial event will offer visitors a unique overview of the industry’s prospects and future. At the expo are present metal, electronics, plastics and rubber industries, industrial ICT solutions, as well as design and consulting within these fields.

See you soon in Tampere!

[Register for free entrance, click here]


More Than a Collaboration

Fortaco x Toyota
 
Our partnership with Toyota is strongly driven by our shared values, and for years, the Fortaco team has been learning Lean Management from the best. 
 
Business Site Holic had an honor to host Toyota Lean Management Centre. This time, focusing on the implementation, coaching, and training of the TPS or Toyota Production System. 
 
Innovation and excellence are the cornerstones of our business, and having Toyota coaching us in these, helps us to transfer the gained value to our customers. 
 
Toyota’s approach values its employees and encourages their input, helping us to support our teams’ engagement in our processes.
 
Why do we work with Toyota? 
 
Because we care about innovation.
Because we strive for excellence.
Because we are a strategic partner. 
Because we shape the future together.
Because we are unlike traditional suppliers. 
 
Together we shape the future.

https://youtu.be/xyOGzU2zqlA

Fortaco’s Tech Tinkerer

Before Arkadiusz Adamczyk joined Fortaco in May 2023, he was responsible for the production of 10,000 buckles per week for the world’s largest automotive safety belt maker. When you buckle into your car, there’s a good chance it’s Adamczyk’s work that keeps you safe. Now he’s working with production in smaller quantities, but says big equipment has big stakes. “We’re making maybe 10 loader frames per week, but with big equipment you don’t want a single mistake.”

As part of Fortaco’s Operational Development (OD) team, Adamczyk works on the analog side. His job title is Lead Manufacturing Engineer, but Inventor might be more apt. “I make jigs to make machine operators’ lives easier and more efficient. I prepare a lot of small jigs with CAD software and make 3D models of them. I recently made a small jig with a special pocket to a machine operator work faster and more efficiently.” He says working with jigs keeps him happy. “I can invent something, and I love the challenge. It’s not like working for NASA where the sky is the limit in terms of budget. In at technical factory you need a good and cheap solution.” Adamczyk has also designed pallets to transport products more efficiently, and he’s part of the team developing production solutions for Fortaco’s new 34,000-square-meter production facility in Gliwice, Poland.

He frequently travels to Fortaco factories to solve problems in Poland, Finland, or wherever he’s needed. “I like that I get to experience the variety of cultures in the Fortaco world. It’s great for both professional and personal development, and it gives me energy for new solutions and inventions.”

Whether at home or at work, he’s tinkering with CAD software and 3D printers. At home, he may make a Fortaco-logoed cell phone cover. At work, he produces small-scale 3D models of design ideas which can be passed around a conference table and discussed. One idea he’s currently experimenting with is replacing welded objects with 3D printed versions to make them cheaper and more efficient. “Instead of welding a sleeve to a plate, I believe we might be able to 3D print the whole thing. But I haven’t reached the testing stage yet.”

He’s also tinkering with AI and playing with how he might use it in production. “I now prepare jigs using CAD software. If the next day I need something similar with different dimensions, I should be able to ask AI to do it. If I can connect AI with CAD, then I can modify the jig with a prompt.” He’s figured out how to connect CAD and AI, but he’s still gathering information before he puts it into practice. “It’s a big step. I’ll feel like Neil Armstrong on the moon when it happens.”


From the Shop to the Top

Peter Hietalahti’s commitment and development pays off over 18 years at Fortaco

“From the shop floor to the top floor” is an often-exaggerated expression to suggest someone started at the bottom of an organization. But it’s literally true with Peter Hietalahti, whose first job at Fortaco was sweeping the factory floor and cleaning cabin windows. It was 2006, he had just completed his obligatory service in the Finnish Air Force, and he was casting about for something to do. So he answered an advertisement in the newspaper.

Of course, sweeping floors and cleaning cabin windows wasn’t the main job, but it was a way to witness up close how the Kurikka production line worked. He was soon assembling forklift cabins and then forest crane cabins, too.

Hietalahti liked the cabin business and wanted to learn more. He enrolled in the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences to study engineering. But he stayed on at the factory, rising at 5 a.m., arriving at the factory at 6, finishing his shift at 2 p.m., and then going to school until 9 p.m., after which he drove 80 kilometers to his home in Nummijärvi. It was a four-year-long test of his commitment to his profession, not to mention a course in night driving on sometimes icy roads.

Good things tend to happen to Hietalahti in May. He was promoted to Production Planner at Fortaco in May 2012, and finished his engineering degree one year later on his 27th birthday in May 2013. In 2014, an organizational change meant production planners took on more customer communication responsibilities, making Hietalahti the main customer contact for handling cabin orders, and his assembly-line background was a benefit. “When pricing a job, I understand the production process, how parts are placed, how the line moves, and it makes estimating assembly costs a lot easier.”  

But there was no end to Hietalahti’s curiosity about manufacturing. In 2017, he enrolled in a Masters of Engineering program and graduated in 2019. In 2021, he joined Tomi Metsä-Ketelä’s team as a Sales Engineer. “My main job was strategic communications with the customer. If they had a question, they contacted me.” He was also tasked with updating cabin prices to reflect the costs of cabin materials, and verifying that the labor calculations were correct. “Sometimes a customer requests changes, and we need a new offer. Or we have new options or model changes. To account for changes in component prices, we usually agree with the customer to update prices once per year.”

Working in Metsä-Ketelä’s team, Hietalahti learned the nuances of pricing and negotiations. In May 2024, he started as an Account Manager. “I’m now taking the next step with responsibility for areas where I previously did background or support work,” he says. “In recent years, rapid cost inflation has caused tough situations and tough  negotiations.” In a way, his job is like a top-level diplomat’s: Sometimes he has to deliver bad news but still make everyone happy. “Fortunately, customers are professionals and they understand the challenges, even if they don’t always like hearing the news. But the process is more than just prices, and it’s very satisfying work when everybody gets a solution that works for them.”

The month of May seems to hold some magic for Hietalahti. Since May is when his academic degrees and professional promotions have come, he has the habit of calling these his “birthday gifts.” But it’s clear no one is gifting him anything. He’s earned every bit of it through hard work and commitment.


Business Site Narva Growing

Exciting times at Narva Business Site.

Fortaco Estonia will open a new facility by the end of this year, which is an important milestone for the factory and Narva town development.

Advanced production specialization line, prefabrication equipment, welding robots, and CNC-machinery centers offer customers competitive solutions and strong operational excellence.

This important factory extension will offer jobs for 40-50 new employees in the beginning.

Extension creates 8,000 m2 additional floor space for Narva Business Site operations, in addition to the current 35,000 m2 located in Narva city centre - with the total land area of approx. 100,000 m2.

Fortaco’s five steel fabrication factories located in Estonia, Finland, and Poland offer manufacturing capabilities with the best-in-class equipment, including design, engineering, and aftermarket services.


Capacity expansion

Business Site Holic capacity extension project is soon ready.
 
The new factory is a solid cornerstone for the current and future growth of the vehicle cabin business.
 
The extension is a critical platform to further support our customers by offering vehicle cabin assembly and production capacity based on a high degree of automation and strong operational excellence. Investing in automatization means investing in the future.
 
The 4000m2 factory extension will be finalized in autumn when operations in the factory will start.
 
Our factory in Holic, Slovakia offers vehicle cabin manufacturing capabilities to the world’s leading OEM customers, including design & engineering and aftermarket services.
 
Four vehicle cabin plants, four nice locations, four teams, and a common target: the best-in-class vehicle cabins and services for our customers.