Twins con­tin­ue moth­er’s work — Read arti­cle about us in Tivi

Finland’s lead­ing busi­ness tech­nol­o­gy mag­a­zine Tivi pub­lished an arti­cle about our inspir­ing sto­ry and suc­ces­sion in Jan­u­ary 2018. We are an excep­tion­al IT com­pa­ny in many ways, accord­ing to Tivi. Two main rea­sons are that our oper­a­tional man­age­ment has been always run by women and we made a suc­cess­ful change of gen­er­a­tion in 2015, both of what are rare among the infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy businesses. 

Mar­jari­it­ta Wakko­la found­ed ISLET and this year we are cel­e­brat­ing our 20-year anniver­sary. Marjariitta’s long and ver­sa­tile career has giv­en a strong foun­da­tion for the fam­i­ly com­pa­ny to become a suc­cess­ful business.

Before start­ing BPS Con­sult­ing Fin­land (now ISLET), she worked as an entre­pre­neur in cloth­ing retail, Finan­cial Man­ag­er as well as an IT Man­ag­er. She was intro­duced to SAP tech­nolo­gies while work­ing at Gov­ern­ment Pro­cure­ment Cen­ter (Hansel), where she was lead­ing Finland’s first SAP imple­men­ta­tion project in 1996. After the imple­men­ta­tion, she moved to SAP Fin­land where she got the idea to start her own com­pa­ny. This is how BPS Con­sult­ing Fin­land (now ISLET) was start­ed in 1998.

The suc­ces­sion in fam­i­ly com­pa­ny start­ed in 2015, when twins Jan­i­na and Tom­mi Luo­to bought the busi­ness and start­ed in oper­a­tional man­age­ment. Active role in the fam­i­ly busi­ness was not in their ear­ly career plans: Tom­mi focused on sports, with a goal to become a pro­fes­sion­al foot­ball play­er, while Jan­i­na worked hard abroad. Three years ago, the idea of con­tin­u­ing their mother’s work as a tech­nol­o­gy pio­neer in fam­i­ly busi­ness, was clar­i­fied for both.

The ground­break­ing change in SAP tech­nolo­gies was one of the inspir­ing fac­tors behind the suc­ces­sion. SAP’s new S/4HANA tech­nol­o­gy has rev­o­lu­tion­ized the world of SAP solu­tions. In the new S/4HANA solu­tion, the busi­ness log­ic and user inter­face have gone through a major trans­for­ma­tion. More­over, com­po­nents of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence have been added to the sys­tem. The two entre­pre­neurs believe that the broad and deep knowl­edge and exper­tise foun­da­tion enables the devel­op­ment of new and inno­v­a­tive solu­tions in the future with SAP technologies.

One of the main suc­cess fac­tor for ISLET has been the strong com­pe­tences and clear focus on the core know-how. More­over, the con­cept of car­ing is a key to suc­cess­ful busi­ness and it is built into the company’s val­ues. The orga­ni­za­tion respects and val­ues every­one who is involved in their ecosys­tem: cus­tomers, team mem­bers, part­ners as well as com­peti­tors. Sus­tain­able busi­ness, for future gen­er­a­tions and for the earth, can only be made with car­ing and empathy.

Read the Tivi’s arti­cle here (in Finnish)!

#Tivi #Islet­Group #Islet­ter­life #fam­ily­busi­ness #tech­com­pa­ny