Gluu

The story behind gluu

Gluu has been created to ‘glue’ work that is broken – by people that have felt the pain from inside real companies, like yours. We believe that ‘Standard work’ only succeeds if we…

Make it easier to work the right way, than the wrong way.

Here’s our story…

Back in 2005 Gluu’s founder and CEO, Søren Pommer, was responsible for Philips’ global digital projects from its Amsterdam HQ. To raise the digital maturity of the company a global network of ‘Country Internet Managers’ was approved by the company’s Board of Management. Søren led the effort to define organizational roles, KPIs, supporting processes, and systems. It was about hiring the right people and then establish a common way of working so that they could exchange best practices across countries. The approach was highly successful and nominated with two internal awards.

After this Søren went back to Copenhagen to become the COO of a digital agency. With about 50 employees and ambitious growth plans it was Søren’s job to streamline operations and make the agency scalable. This required common ways of working and an ERP system. However, he soon realized that creative agencies and business processes mix like oil and water. So during these months, Søren started to have doubts about some of the work he and his team did back in Philips:

“If a process has 15 activities and only 5 of these connect to IT systems then how can we know that it is executed? It could be that some employees don’t understand, or agree with, the process and only ‘check boxes’ to make bosses happy?”

He realized that the normal way of large, systems-driven and top-down process governance implementations was broken. To succeed with winning the hearts and minds of the people that actually do the work a new way forward was badly needed. It should…

  • involve the people that knew best
  • ensure that work instructions were updated continuously to reflect their actual, practical learning
  • increase clarity and transparency of how work flowed across silos
  • save time and make work easier by turning processes into helpful guides and ensuring that compliance reporting became a byproduct of simply following the processes.

This new way forward required new software. A platform that would work without the need to change any systems and was so user-friendly that anybody could work with making processes easier to Understand, Execute and Improve.

employees of Gluu

In 2011 Søren founded Gluu and the team has spent nine years working with more than 500 managers and process owners to find the sweet spot between speed and control, when it comes to common ways of working and compliance work. Today Gluu’s 3.0 platform helps more than one hundred businesses and thousands of users in almost 60 countries to collaborate around business processes. The journey continues and every day we take one more step towards realizing the founding vision.

Management Team

Søren Pommer, the CEO of Gluu

CEO

Søren Pommer

Marketing, Sales and Admin

Jacob Carstensen CTO at Gluu

CTO

Jacob Carstensen

Product and Development Operations