Tiera

Quick facts

• Tiera Oy has built a modern data warehouse solution with the help of Sulava, which enhances and strengthens the company’s data-driven management.
• Sulava was involved from the early stages of the project and was chosen as a partner due to its expertise and customer-centric approach.
• Previously, Tiera created reports manually from different systems, but as the company grew, this method became challenging.
• Thanks to data automation, reports can now be generated with the push of a button, improving the quality and efficiency of reporting.
• Working with Sulava’s team was described as close and flexible.

Tiera Oy is an in-house company and social enterprise owned by nearly 400 municipal organisations and wellbeing services counties. As a nationwide company owned by municipal organisations, Tiera offers high-quality and productised ICT services as well as digital and ICT solutions to support smooth everyday life and the development of operations – for customers and residents.

At the turn of the last decade, Tiera still made reports on various systems and sources manually. At the time, the way of working was not problematic, but as the company grew rapidly, it became a challenge.

“When our owner-customers started to utilise our ICT services in very large volumes, knowledge-based management methods became more important in the company. We had a clear need for a modern, high-quality and centralised reporting system,” comments Jyri Lehtonen, Business Director of ICT Services at Tiera. “Having access to the same automated service management data was really important.”

The planning of the renewal of Tiera’s reporting had two dimensions: as the number of customers increased, customer reporting had to be improved, and the flow of information throughout the organization had to be guaranteed.

“Thanks to data automation, we have been able to get reports on quality, for example, at the push of a button for a long time. Now, the data warehouse solution developed together with Sulava takes our experience even further,” says Lehtonen.

New data warehouse for reliability

In the early stages of the data warehouse construction project, Tiera envisioned that there would be significantly more data sources, but the company quickly realised that the entity was becoming too big.

“We narrowed down our original vision and focused on our ITSM system,” describes Development Specialist Mervi Tiilikka. “There are a huge number of tickets circulating in the system. With the data warehouse solution, the whole is clearer.”

According to Tiilikka, a data warehouse is a living ecosystem.

“The ability to drill down into data is very essential here. In a way, a data warehouse is a living entity that requires continuous maintenance and monitoring, and in which error tolerance plays an important role,” Tiilikka continues.

Microsoft products and Sulava selected

Tiera’s data warehouse project began with Sulava commissioning a plan for implementation.

“After selecting tools, verifying the ecosystem and various modelling, we moved on to the actual implementation. Before being transferred to production, the whole was turned into a POC, from which many lessons were learned. Finally, we took the project into production and the whole thing was tied together,” Tiilikka says.

Sulava was involved from the early stages of the project and was selected due to its expertise and customer orientation.

“We had collaborated with Sulava before, but the cooperation really started to expand through this project,” Lehtonen says.

Tiilikka describes working with Sulava’s team as close.

“It has been really easy to work with the smooth team, and we have become familiar with this as we have travelled quite a long way together. They are very well prepared to react to things, we have always received answers and things have been reviewed as needed,” Tiilikka says.

Even though the data warehouse project is practically complete, active status monitoring is still carried out in the project and the team communicates with each other.

“The attitude of the smooth team is very customer-oriented, they think about our needs very well. I feel that we are more colleagues than customers and suppliers,” Tiilikka describes.

Needs expand and change, artificial intelligence comes

The nature of knowledge management projects is such that they are never completely finished, as needs expand and change over time.

“We cannot say that this is now complete and now the focus is on something else, because the whole requires continuous development, monitoring and maintenance,” Lehtonen says. “Our needs are constantly changing and expanding. The solution will be updated as the world and business needs evolve. Artificial intelligence is strongly present everywhere and I believe that every organization is thinking about utilizing it in different solutions. So do we.”

Author: Juhani Lassila
Published: January 2025