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Somehow, the end of the year has crept up on us once again! 2024 was another great year for IMA and our employees. As we celebrate the holiday season and start looking forward to 2025, let us also reflect on the exciting events of this past year.
So what happened at IMA in 2024?
A Big Anniversary
2024 marked the 35th anniversary of IMA. As we talked about in our recent blog post, Looking Back and Moving Forward: IMA Celebrates 35 Years, IMA began as a small, family business in the Calvert’s garage in 1989. Since then, we have grown tremendously and taken on many opportunities, while still maintaining the heart of the company. When you’ve been around as long as us, stagnation is not an option! The industry has changed a lot since our humble beginnings and IMA has evolved to continue as a cutting edge leader in technology.
Continued Growth
In our 35th year, IMA continued to strive for improvement and focused on meeting clients’ needs. Our development team devoted time to updating and rolling out new features in our one-of-a-kind software solution, uManage Pro. We’ve helped numerous new clients get a handle on their Material Master data this year, making tangible improvements to their bottom lines.
uManage Pro has been an incredible addition to IMA’s toolbox, one we use internally for all data cleansing projects and provide directly to customers for easy governance. It’s exciting to see how it has grown–especially as we’ve incorporated feedback from clients. We fully expect 2025 to be an even better year with changes that make uManage Pro even more powerful.
Mixing Business and Pleasure
Throughout the year, IMA hosted a variety of events to try to make the day-to-day a little more interesting for our employees. Some highlights include our Earth Month Bingo event, Cyber Security Month events, and annual holiday party.
Earth Month Bingo challenged employees to take certain actions to make their lives a little more eco-friendly and bring attention to the sorts of changes we can easily make on a personal level. To make things more interesting, each “bingo” was worth an entry for a gift card.
Every October, Cyber Security Month takes place with a new theme. This year, Get Cyber Safe’s theme was Generation Cyber Safe: Because online security knows no age. We used the month at IMA to learn about different threats, security best practices, and how to stay safe in the digital world. We also had a fun Halloween meeting where staff wore costumes and got to hang out as we chatted about cyber security and gave away a prize! (For more information on Cyber Security Month, check out our blog post.)
IMA wraps each December up with a holiday party for our team. Since we work remotely, this is a nice time for employees to meet in person and celebrate a year of hard work with good food and prizes. No one leaves the party without an exciting gift in tow!
Awards and Recognition
This year, our VP and COO, Troy Miller, was nominated for the Premier’s Award. The award goes to outstanding college graduates in several different categories; Troy was nominated in the Business category, representing his alma mater, Conestoga College. The nomination was a huge honour, recognizing the years of hard work and innovation Troy has brought to the industry. IMA is incredibly proud to see Troy’s accomplishments acknowledged at large.
We also internally recognized several of our employees this year who reached impressive milestones in their careers:
Carolyn Bond celebrated her 35th anniversary with IMA. (Yes, she’s been here since the very beginning!)
Bruce Mabee came close behind with 34 years at IMA.
Chris Comeau rounds out our big anniversaries with 10 years at IMA!
Employee Highlights
This year, we had five co-op students join us from colleges and universities around Ontario, including Conestoga College and Western University. We’re always thrilled to welcome the next generation into our group to offer them real life experience in the field. It’s a learning experience for us, too! We’re grateful for the time they gave to IMA and continue to wish them the best in their journeys.
Giving Back
This year, IMA sponsored two youth softball teams. We were happy to see our sponsorship go towards making softball more accessible for the community by keeping fees reduced. Plus, our IMA teams did great and had a lot of fun over the course of the season!
We also continued our annual tradition of participating in an “adopt-a-family” program where employees collectively donate gifts and groceries to a family for their Christmas celebration. IMA is always proud to see the generosity of our employees in action.
Blogs, Blogs, and More Blogs
December marks one full year of us running our revamped blog. This has been a fun journey for us and we hope that you’ve learned a thing or two about material master data management. For those just joining us–or those wishing for a review–check out the blogs we’re done by going here: https://www.imaltd.com/blog
Or, for a quick, curated look, we recommend checking out these blog posts:
How Material Master Data Drives Efficiency: Introduction (start here and read the whole 4 post series)
Where Do I Start With My Material Master Data? The Importance of Data Evaluations
And That’s a Wrap!
This brings us to the end of our last blog post of 2024–and the end of year one of this blog. We’re incredibly grateful for all of you readers and can’t wait for you to see what we have in store for next year.
Until then, have a safe and happy holiday season!
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