Hannu Huttunen, CEO

Personnel

At the end of the year 2015 altogether 517 employees worked in Bittium in Finland, USA, Great Britain and Singapore. The amount of personnel increased by 37 employees from last year in Finland. The average age of the personnel was 41.2 years. R&D engineers and specialists constituted clearly the largest proportion of the personnel.

Constant development of expertise is vital for Bittiumīs business and personnelīs competence growth. Bittiumīs core competences are strong and extensive know-how of radio technology, embedded software, electronics, and product integration. The development of engineering competences has been further supported by technical trainings and virtual competence teams that have been formed also to meet newly appeared needs. At Bittium the way of working is based on the implementation of Lean and Agile methods.

In 2015 the focus was also in project management and supervisory work. The focus points of the project management development were in increasing the profitability and fluency of the projects by further increasing the project managementīs competencies in e.g. mastering the finances and processes, and productization aspects and requirements management in R&D projects. Development of supervisory work was continued with the theme of coaching leadership. The development discussion process was renewed with focus on continuous supervisor work.

Bittium continued to participate in the N4S (Need for Speed) program, where the operational models and methods of real time economy is developed and tested. During 2015 the focus and results were in continuous integration and test automation development, increasing transparency and collecting feedback and quality data in real time. The program was widely utilized in product development and in managing the production chain.

Accelerate, a program where the aim is at creating and maintaining a growth basis for innovations, continued as a development model in 2015. The internal idea tool development continued. Through the tool the personnel can share ideas in a transparent easy to use forum that enables discussion and co-development. Through an open tool the threshold for presenting new ideas is lower and the ideas are handled more regularly. One of the targets is to increase the amount of testing the capabilities of ideas in practice more often than before.

As the brand and the company name changed, also the Bittiumīs annual personnel survey was renamed as Bittium Employee Survey (BES). The survey was carried out in the fall, with participation of 73 percent of the personnel. The results improved clearly from the previous year. According to the survey, the company culture, team-spirit, multitalented and committed experts and competence capital still highlight Bittiumīs strengths as a company.

Year 2015 was a year of much regeneration. In addition to the changes we also celebrated the 30-year-old history of our company. In summer 2015 all of Bittiumīs staff gathered to the joint summer event, "BitStock2015", in Oulu. The event strengthened the spirit of fellowship between different sites. Previous corresponding joint event was the companyīs 20th anniversary "Together2005" in Rovaniemi.