For the second time, we've honoured outstanding achievements with the smart award. kothes employees can apply for the award, across 6 different categories. The jury is made up of the entire staff, as the entire kothes team can vote on the best entries via an internal survey.
As a prize, the winners not only receive honour and recognition and the coveted trophy made of "finest Bohemian rock crystal," as it was described with a wink by the moderator, but also the opportunity to make a donation of 500 Euros through kothes to a charitable institution of their choice.
Once again this year, the moderator was our Head of Quality Management, Carsten Sieber. He created the award, in order to highlight particularly successful ideas and their implementation, in contrast to standard practice in Quality Management.
Due to the current situation, the award ceremony could not take place during the kothes general meeting (as it did last year), but was held online this time. However, this had (almost) no impact on the scale, as around 100 colleagues dialled-in for the award ceremony and eagerly awaited the awards within their individual categories.
Here are the winners in the six categories:
Information
The "Information" category is all about optimal user orientation and the best possible communication of information. Steffen Kroop managed to implement this for an apparently simple product, a toolbox. The challenge was the numerous special functions of the toolbox. Our Graphic Designer succeeded in communicating the extensive possibilities of use in an internationally comprehensible way, via images alone, and in a textless manual.
Winner: Steffen Kroop
Concept
In practically no time, Nina Schaub and Verena Döhler transformed the customer workshop on the subject of "Target Audience-Specific Information", which was actually planned as an in-person event, into an interactive digital workshop. For this purpose, they used a digital whiteboard with which they actively involved the participants with the aid of various methods, such as "Speed Boat", "Define your Audience", etc.
Winning Team: Nina Schaub, Verena Döhler
Customer Support
Christina Westing and Robert Schiffer have shown exceptional personal commitment to a project from the world of Banking. They delved deeply into our client's complex subject matter with dedication, making a valuable contribution to the overall success of the project.
Winning Team: Christina Westing, Robert Schiffer
Process Improvement
This submission involved the optimisation of processes for managing and reviewing supplier documentation at a large logistics company. Dennis Hopkins was instrumental in ensuring the correctness and completeness of well over 1000 documents, in an efficient process.
Winner: Dennis Hopkins
Blog Posts
In this category, we honour outstanding external or internal blog contributions. This year, Janina Fink won with an internal blog post. In her article, she gave an entertaining account of the various challenges during a consulting project.
Winner: Janina Fink
Open Category
Winning Team: Daniel Fritz, Henning Larsen, Christian Schwirtz
In the Open category, any project may be submitted that doesn't necessarily fit into the other categories. This time, the winner was our IT Administrators, who managed to transition the entire company to a Home Office virtually overnight, without any major difficulties. In this way we remained available for our customers, and all departments were able to work productively as usual.
Our warmest congratulations to the winners!
We're pleased to have so many creative and customer-oriented solutions and we're also sure we'll be implementing many exciting projects with our customers in 2021, so that we may again award six projects from numerous nominations next year.