Results
✅ Faster lead times across all residential projects: The best projects improved by around 20% within just one year, reaching below target duration.
✅ 1,100 apartments completed between 10/2024–11/2025: Improved lead times meant that Hartela produced most houses in Finland over 12 months.
✅ Lower costs: Halving takt time from 8h → 4h → 2h significantly reduced labour costs in the takt phase on every cycle.
✅ Takt production successfully rolled out across all residential construction: Nearly 100% of site management would choose the new takt model over the traditional approach.
✅ Fewer disruptions and faster reactions: Immediate visibility into quality and deviations.
✅ Lower financing costs + months faster access to revenue for developers.
✅ Metrics and analytics for company leadership: Full transparency into projects and a unified picture of true progress.
"Sites stopped talking about being three days late and started talking about being an hour or half late instead. The teams really embraced this.”
JANNE ALAKOMI, HEAD OF PRODUCTION
Challenge
When market conditions worsened, Hartela realised that something needed to change — fast.
The strategic priorities became:
- Industrialised construction
- Increasing the level of prefabrication
- Shortening lead times
But a new bottleneck emerged: success would require daily and even hourly planning and control on site instead of traditional weekly planning.
In other words, they needed a new level of grip, and real-time visibility into project progress and roadblocks.
“We quickly understood the potential of takt production and industrialised construction, and started developing a new model for Hartela. We didn’t want to tinker with a single pilot — the impact would have been too small. Instead, we decided to bring the change into all residential construction.”
JANNE ALAKOMI, HEAD OF PRODUCTION
Solution
In 2024, Hartela visited Sitedrive and SiteFactory sites where takt production was already being implemented successfully. These visits confirmed that the model works in practice, not just on paper.
Based on these insights, Hartela introduced several key changes:
- Hartela’s own takt-based production strategy. A company-wide operating model starting from early project planning. Implementation included comprehensive training, communication, and the creation of internal support networks.
- Production planning and management in Sitedrive at the hour and day level. One schedule principle enables precise control of work, real-time visibility into site activities, and effective use of data.
- Bringing workers into interior phases via SiteFactory. The focus shifted from contract management to people management.
- Tracking actual progress directly on-site via Sitedrive Mobile, ensuring up-to-date visibility into execution at all times.
- Using data to identify issues. Disruptions, bottlenecks, and obstacles are identified quickly, and learnings are transferred to upcoming projects.
- Increasing prefabrication, for example, with bathroom modules and other prefabricated elements.
The transformation was, above all, a shared success for Hartela. The model would not have worked without active involvement from the entire organisation — site teams, supervisors, and leadership committing to daily and hourly-level execution.
Now that the model’s effectiveness has been proven in apartment building projects, Hartela is expanding these lessons to other types of projects as well.
“Being able to track actual progress in real time during the takt cycle convinced us that Sitedrive was the right choice. It gives us possibilities our previous scheduling tools simply didn’t provide. It’s not enough for the project to finish on schedule — the schedule must be monitored and controlled continuously according to actual progress. That’s the only way to stay on track and avoid unnecessary running around.”
JANNE ALAKOMI, HEAD OF PRODUCTION
Examples of Hartela projects using Sitedrive
“Sitedrive’s data is exactly what I’ve been longing for. Assessing schedule maturity and being able to track how the schedule is used is extremely important for site management. Now, whether we are on schedule is no one’s opinion, the data shows the facts. This way, everyone is treated equally.”
JANNE ALAKOMI, HEAD OF PRODUCTION
About Hartela
Hartela is a family-owned company founded in 1942 with annual revenues of around €300 million. Operating as a main contractor, Hartela builds projects across Finland.
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