When Lasse Wittrup Andersen joined Cramo A/S at the beginning of 2015, the company was not new to him. He had been in office for four years as CFO and knew the financial challenges he faced. The economic crisis had been particularly hard for the construction industry. And for a company that leases materials to the construction industry, it was difficult to see light at the end of the tunnel. Wittrup knew that something drastic had to happen. One day he stumbled upon the book “Service Design for Business” a methodology tackling company challenges by applying a strong customer focus.

Around the same time, Danish Design Center had launched the DDC PLUS program – an initiative to document the value of applying design methodology to business development. Soon after the collaboration between Permanent Beta and CRAMO became a reality when the project was selected to be a part of DDC PLUS.

After collecting data and gaining insight into the company’s strength and weaknesses ideation workshops were held inviting over half of Cramo’s employees to work on solutions. Business cases were made for each of the solutions ending up with one concept that could potentially mean new revenue as well as better strategic planning.

Building upon this understanding a completely new customer-oriented sales concept was created rooted in better and more optimal underlying systems and processes. Today the strategy has contributed to Cramo’s growth and has turned the red numbers on the bottom line into black.