Harmony Enterprises Generates Growth With Eureka! Winning Ways
Our Client
Founded more than 35 years ago, Harmony Enterprises, Inc. designs and manufactures waste management and recycling equipment. The company employs 60 workers in the small southeastern Minnesota city of Harmony. They offer more than 40 standard and custom designed models of vertical balers, and with customers in retail, industrial, medical, and other industries, Harmony Enterprises’ products are found worldwide. The company prides itself on a global focus on quality, profitability, and safety.
Our Client's Problem
For years, customers requested products and features that Harmony Enterprises could not meet with their standard models. While the company did custom work, they saw an untapped market if they could create new features and products to meet the demand from these customers. Planning another phase of growth, the company projected that they could add an additional $5 million dollars in sales revenue over the next three years if they could capture this additional market. But Harmony Enterprises needed new ideas. With a plan for growth and without ideas, their projected growth turned into a $5 million gap.
Enterprise Minnesota's Solution
Harmony Enterprises needed to generate ideas to grow their business, and they needed help doing it. Having a longstanding relationship with Minnesota Technology, Inc. that began over 13 years ago, they knew where to get help. Harmony Enterprise President Steve Cremer met with Minnesota Technology field specialists to plan the project. Together, they decided that the Eureka! Winning Ways program fit their needs. The program
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 Eureka! Winning Ways helped ideas become the organization's ideas. It really has brought the whole organization together because everyone is interested in the success of our ideas and helping play a part of it.
-- Steve Cremer
President
Harmony Enterprises, Inc.
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focuses on small to mid-size businesses by generating ideas that, in turn, generate growth. Always an innovative company, Harmony Enterprises has implemented lean manufacturing, lean technology, and value-stream mapping. Likewise, in this instance, Harmony Enterprises wanted to be one of the first in the entire state of Minnesota to go through the process if Eureka! Winning Ways. They selected 12 employees from all areas of the business to participate. The field specialists facilitated the process among Steve and his employees that eventually created 64 new ideas. Through the program’s filtering process, the group narrowed those down to four ideas that were sent to Eureka Ranch for consideration. Eureka Ranch put the four ideas to test with their computer-based idea-assessment system Merwyn. Based upon idea-ranking results returned by Merwyn, Harmony Enterprises narrowed down their focus to two ideas that could close their $5 million gap.
Harmony Enterprises' Results
Harmony Enterprises took their ideas generated from the Eureka! Winning Ways process and allocated two teams of employees to determine if each was market-ready. The teams researched implementation, customer-need, and probable costs. After a month researching, the evaluation teams concluded that both ideas were market-ready. However, the evaluations also found that one idea could be implemented immediately, while the other would require technical expertise outside of the company’s workforce. Moving ahead to implement the idea that could be used immediately, Harmony Enterprises rolled-out a new feature to customers in October 2007. It is an automatic wire feed to bale cardboard in recycling compactors, which allows customers to greatly reduce time and energy. From this one new feature developed through the Eureka! Winning Ways process, Harmony Enterprises expects to fill at least 30-40 percent of their projected $5 million gap over the next three years. Currently, they are in process of bringing in outside expertise to implement the second idea and further eliminate their gap. In addition, they plan to continue using Eureka! Winning Ways to find even more ways to grow their company – including another idea generation session this summer.