Award-Winning Employee: Michèle Heller Wins the Innovator of the Year Award

“I find a lot, but not everything,” says Michèle Heller. A sentence that may sound casual at first glance, yet it perfectly describes a challenge many people face in their daily work. Project knowledge today is often scattered everywhere: in Outlook, on SharePoint, in Teams, or on network drives. The information exists, but it is often difficult to find – and that costs time.

Michèle Heller, Head of Digital Planning in Köniz, was not willing to accept this. She started thinking further: What if project information could be found more quickly – regardless of where it is stored? This is how her idea “GruBo” was born: an AI-powered search interface designed to make project knowledge centrally accessible. A kind of digital project assistant that bundles content and supports employees in their daily work. Michèle was not the only one to impress the jury with a forward-looking idea. The other finalists also demonstrated how diverse and vibrant innovation at Gruner truly is.

Lean Management for Better Project Control

Second place went to Steffen Büchner, Senior Project Manager and BIM Manager for Building Services in Köniz, and Michael Bont, Head of Business Unit Infrastructure Basel, Environment. They aim to introduce a lean transformation at Gruner to plan and manage construction projects much more efficiently – shifting from project thinking to production thinking, with the goal of minimizing waste. Traditional project management is being redesigned: instead of rigid planning with fixed deadlines and limited coordination, the approach moves toward an ongoing, data-driven system for improved collaboration. At the core of this approach is collaborative production planning, enabling reliable alignment among all stakeholders. This is intended to help deliver projects at Gruner faster, more cost-effectively, and with lower risk. In the future, this approach is set to evolve into a scalable service model. While Steffen and Michael aim to make construction processes more efficient, Axel Bocion focuses on greater sustainability through reuse.

ReUse Platform for Sustainable Reuse of Building Components

Third place went to Axel Bocion, Project Manager for Demolition and Building Contaminants in Basel, and his team. Their idea is the ReUse platform as a new business model. It provides each client with their own inventory app to capture reusable building components. The data is automatically stored in the client’s account. There, components can be searched, tracked via QR code, and storage locations managed. This allows clients to maintain an overview of inventory, location, and condition of their materials and reuse them in future projects.

All three ideas address concrete challenges from everyday project work and are being further developed with the support of innovation@gruner.