Success stories（https://woodhouse.ee/category/success-stories/）
Harmet – a shortcut from an idea to a finished building
Even the smallest hut can sometimes be the beginning of something big. What started out as a mere market research exercise to identify the demand for construction site huts, has now evolved into the largest modular building manufacturing and assembly operation in the Baltics. This is how the success story of Harmet begins – from some businessmen meeting each other for the first time, finding common ground to develop a new product and persevering through the thick and thin to become one of the leading modular building companies in Scandinavia.
Toomas Kalev, Harmet’s chairman of the board remembers those early days vividly. “We were toying around with the idea of abandoning our metal container business due to increasing cost pressure from the east and were eager to identify market opportunities for manufacturing site huts when our paths crossed with Ivar Valdmaa and Toomas Linamäe from CRAMO, who seemed genuinely intrigued by our plans. We completed our first modular hut within 6-12 months from our initial meeting and were hungry for more, even though at first we had 1-2 people working on the project and our output was limited to 1 hut per month. Today we employ over 800 people and are selling modular buildings to Scandinavia, to the United Kingdom and even the United States,” Kalev gleams with pride. As a firm believer in a hands-on approach, he is no stranger to modular assembly himself. “I always tell our new recruits in the office to go down to the factory floor and get involved – this way you learn at least 5 times quicker than sitting behind the computer all day.”
SilviaBo apartment building in Sweden by Harmet OÜ
Design and engineering are key
There have been quite a few learning curves for Harmet during its 20 years of operations, the 2008 financial crisis serving particularly valuable lessons for survival. The numbers were looking great, lulling the enterprise into believing that everything was going well. “But you can never relax when running a business, you must always be on the lookout for improvement and efficiency gains, otherwise you run the risk of losing focus and becoming too laid-back,” explains Kalev. During those tumultuous times Harmet even resorted to knocking up pallets, just to keep the workflow going and the staff busy. “You can’t run away from hard times, but you can learn to deal with them, which is why we are committed to always building reserves and remaining accountable for our actions and promises. We are still using the same brand name, we still have the same people at the top and still answer the same phone numbers – this resilience builds up trustworthiness in the eyes of our partners and our employees alike,” believes Kalev.
Today Harmet’s greatest challenge is increasing efficiency, as labour costs are on the rise and customers in Scandinavia and further are reluctant to absorb the cost of transportation themselves, leaving Harmet to find the solutions to keep pricing competitive on export markets. A stroke of luck brought Harmet the opportunity to buy pre-owned but little used assembly lines from a modular building factory in St Petersburg some years ago, creating a comfortable buffer for reserve production capacity. But production capacity alone is only a part of the equation – efficiency is achieved through the seamless operation of the entire value chain, from the initial drawings to final assembly and quality control.