Olli-Mikko – from summer worker to Group Technology Specialist
Olli-Mikko Kortelainen is responsible for the machines and methods our Group companies will use to manufacture their products in the years ahead. He first came to Ouneva as a summer worker on a press brake in 2010.
During his engineering studies, Olli-Mikko spent a summer operating a press brake at Ouneva Oy. After graduating, he joined a metal industry group in Joensuu, where he worked in supervisory roles. In 2015 his path led back to Ouneva’s sheet metal factory, this time as a production engineer. As one of the region’s largest employers, the company offered the kind of challenges and career paths he was looking for.
Supervisory responsibility was part of the job from the very first days. At its largest the team was around thirty people, and some of them already knew Olli-Mikko from his summer job. “To them I was the summer boy, and now that same summer boy was their supervisor.” Being a supervisor has never felt like a burden, as Olli-Mikko enjoys working with people.
How did the job change over ten years?
Although the job title stayed the same for a decade, the work itself was in constant transition. After leading the sheet metal team, he took on maintenance, servicing and sealing, and soon also major equipment investments and the decisions on which machines and manufacturing technologies the team would acquire. Every new area of responsibility required study and stepping outside his comfort zone, but Olli-Mikko saw that above all as something that made the work more interesting. Acquiring a coordinate measuring machine was an entirely new process for the company: he learned both to operate and to program the device, and served as its main operator. In his final years at the factory he took on more responsibility for running production when the factory manager was away, and hosted factory tours for visitors.
How did the Group-level role come about?
A new direction opened up through the Group’s strategy work, when the Future Technologies initiative was established at Ouneva Group in 2024. Olli-Mikko was one of the people invited to the working group, and it soon became clear that the task required someone full time. In May 2025 he started as the Group’s Technology Specialist. One of his first observations came as a surprise: even though this is one group with one owner family, the companies had quite different ways of doing things. Since then, practices have been harmonised.
What does a Technology Specialist do?
Olli-Mikko’s job is to keep Ouneva Group at the forefront of manufacturing technology by finding new and more efficient manufacturing methods for the Group companies. This is how the Group strengthens its competitive edge for the future as well. Technologies are sought at industry trade fairs, from equipment manufacturers and in technical publications, but development initiatives often arise from customer needs or from opportunities identified by our own sales team and factory management. When sales comes with a challenge, saying that a certain kind of product needs to be manufacturable, it’s Olli-Mikko’s job to work out which equipment and method will do it best. Every investment decision starts from an assessment of the added value it delivers and whether it makes economic sense.
Solutions that work also travel from one company to another. Laser marking, for example, is in use at several Group companies, and experience gained elsewhere helped in acquiring the most recent machine. At the Jotwire factory, mobile robots are currently being piloted to automate internal logistics, and the lessons learned there are intended to be scaled to the other companies as well. In the coming years, Olli-Mikko believes the industry will be shaped most by artificial intelligence and the production automation it brings with it.
What did ten years in production teach you?
Those ten years show above all how Olli-Mikko makes decisions. “In decision-making you should always think about the person doing the actual work. How will this affect their job? That is easily forgotten by people who have no first-hand experience of production.”
What is the hardest part of the job?
The most challenging part of the work is managing time. Development work is done together with people from the different companies, and when production is under heavy pressure, development projects understandably take a back seat. The projects have also taught him an important lesson: “Even something that seems self-evident is worth writing down and saying out loud, because mistakes usually start from an assumption.”
What makes this different from other places?
Every employer Olli-Mikko has worked for throughout his career has been a family business. At Ouneva Group, that background shows particularly in speed and in the agility of the organisation, where at best a major investment decision can be just one phone call away. The company also has a flat hierarchy, and the family business background shows in how people treat one another: “The threshold to approach anyone here is low. None of us in office roles is afraid of getting our hands dirty, and we help out whenever we can.”
