COVIA

IDEASCALE

2018 IM AWARD WINNER: BEST INNOVATION PROCESS

Headquartered in Chesterland, Ohio, Covia, Inc. (CVIA) is a leading provider of high-performance crystalline silica sand and advanced resin-coated sand products serving the Oil & Gas, Foundry, Glass, Sports & Recreation, Building Products and Filtration markets. The commitment to Technology and Innovation is mainly associated with the value-added product portfolios, but it also extends into every aspect of the business, including patented operational processes and approach to efficiencies.

To support their ongoing business innovation initiatives, Covia gathers ideas from employees at all levels of the organization. Their previous idea generation process involved a collaboration and review system organized by department. And, each new idea required manual and intensive employee involvement as the ideas progressed from the ideation stage, to idea assessment and implementation.

Due to Covia’s global footprint, with sand mines, coating plants, terminals and R & D Facilities and administrative offices in many locations, it was determined that this idea review and process was cumbersome and a more effective cross-functional platform was needed. The Sustainable Development Business Innovation (SDBI) Team at Covia took the initiative to identify a more effective idea management process and software platform that would also align well with their established Stage Gate® product development process. They evaluated numerous vendors and selected IdeaScale on the basis of its functionality, user friendly interface, and competitive cost.

For the implementation phase, the SDBI team again took the lead and engaged various cross-functional teams and followed this process:

• The test launch of IdeaScale was carried out with twenty Covia employees from different departments who submitted seed ideas. These same participants became champions in their departments.

• Once officially launched, the IdeaScale portal was promoted through face-to-face meetings, online conferences and company newsletter articles.

• The original ideas on the platform were organized into three major practice areas (campaigns) and one proprietary campaign:

1.Product-Business Innovation: technology and product innovations, market and business development initiatives, as well as ideas regarding mergers and acquisitions.

2.Best Practices: ideas with a main focus on Operational Excellence, focused specifically on decreasing operating costs and enhancing safety.

3.General Ideas: ideas that enhance company culture and topics pertaining to HR, Legal or Health & Wellness

4.Proprietary Ideas: If a submitted idea is deemed to be proprietary and confidential, then the IdeaScale Administrator quickly moves this idea into the “Proprietary Idea Bucket”, which only few company managers have access to.

2IdeaScale Case Studies

CoviaNew Products, Better Processes

There were four main roles within the SDBI community: 1. Idea Submitters 2. Subject Matter Expert Team Member 3. Idea Moderator 4. IdeaScale Advisory Committee Member

Once employees submit their ideas, they are periodically vetted and refined in the following ways: after the SME-T idea prescreening, Covia assigned the promising ideas to Idea Moderators who would evaluate the ideas against the idea author’s suggested value estimation. Next, the Idea Moderator creates a mini-business case and submits it back to the SME-Teams that run the data from the mini business case against the internal Covia Idea Screen Card, ISC algorithm. The algorithm delivers a composite weighted Index between 0 and 40, an any ideas with ISC>25 get the green light for testing.

Each campaign has a unique workflow process, and an example workflow from the Product Innovation (PI) campaign is described below:

•Team Review: Sub teams comprising cross-functional Subject Matter Experts (SME-T) are established. •Idea Score Screen (ISS): SMEs utilize the ISS for idea reviewing, scoring and relative ranking. •Stage Gate® Product Development: The top ranked ideas next move to Gate One of the Stage Gate® process for additional screening by the Stage Gate committee before they are approved to move to Stage One, which is the R&D Feasibility Study phase.

At the executive level, the SDBI Team presents the findings of the progress made with IdeaScale for all campaigns on a quarterly basis to the SDBI Steering Committee. This committee comprises five Executive Vice Presidents. The objective of this committee is to provide overall guidance, and also remove any roadblocks.

In less than a year, Covia has reported the following results: • 17% of the workforce shared ideas in IdeaScale • 500% increase in ideas gathered over previous year • An estimated $10 million in new revenues* is expected to be materialized in the next couple years

from ideas submitted to IdeaScale under the Product Innovation campaign • An estimated $2 million in cost savings* are expected to be materialized in the next couple years

from ideas submitted to IdeaScale under the Best Practices campaign • Covia’s SDBI Team Lead was awarded the 2017 Sustainable Development Employee of the Year and

Founders’ Award for his work on advancing the Sustainable Development Business Innovation process and for creating the IdeaScale employee engagement platform.

“After an in-depth review of many open innovation management software vendors, we moved forward with IdeaScale, because of its great functionality, user friendly interface, competitive cost and exceptional customer support,” said Dr. Anastasios (Taso) Melisaris, SD Business Innovation Team Lead. “IdeaScale has enabled us to effectively bring down silos and boost Associate engagement from many mines, coating plants and offices. It has also increased knowledge sharing, idea co-creation, and we are on the right track to drive breakthrough innovations in product development and operational excellence.”

* Financial estimates generated from the IdeaScale® database should not be considered part of the company publicly reported estimates for financial results.