Savon Voima - a Finnish publicly listed energy company - chose Frends iPaaS to achieve agility in data integration. Savon Voima needed to manage data flows and gather them into a master data storage to enable data-driven leadership.
Business Goals
The reliability of energy supply is the basis for the functioning of cities as a whole, and Savon Voima's mission is to enable the city functioning reliably and safely. As in any energy company, processes driven by data play a crucial part in the business. That is why Savon Voima Oyj needed an easy to use, cost-effective and transparent integration platform to bring agility to data integration and process automation. The company also wanted to enable data-driven leadership, which requires holistic and up-to-date analytics on the live data going through processes and systems.
Frends was extremely easy to use and lowered the development time remarkably, enabled on-the-spot visual monitoring and agility to integration development. Eventually, with Frends, we could enable the data-driven leadership.
Tuomas Räsänen, Director, Business Technologies, Savon Voima Oyj
Integration Challenges
Before Frends iPaas, Savon Voima had an integration solution that covered only part of the systems' integrations. The old integration solution was a black-box. There was no easy way of checking what had gone wrong as something went wrong: was the problem in interface or data?
Also, creating new integrations was too slow and time-consuming. The Total-Cost-of-Ownership was not at an acceptable level.
The old integration solution's black-box approach prevented the possibility of gathering the relevant data into master data storage, which was a mandatory requirement to create analytics. Without cleansed up-to-date analytics, data-driven leadership was not possible.
Results
Savon Voima has implemented over 80% of all integrations in only six months. The previous integration solution covered only 25% of data flows and automation. The speed and agility of the visual low-code approach enabled fast development and monitoring. The problem-solving and incident management speed increased as every process instance in Frends is visually depicted. Data used in each instance is visible to the operator.
Savon Voima used Frends as their centralized integration hub. This way, they could also gather and cleanse the data and store it in the data warehouse. This approach enabled up-to-date analytics that, in the end - enabled data-driven leadership.
Also, the robustness of Frends has pleased Savon Voima - no unpredicted breaks in service.
What Frends offered:
- Frends iPaaS enabled the agile integrations;
- The Low-code approach enabled Do-It-Yourself (DIY) integrations;
- Centralized monitoring dashboard for all data flows and technical automation processes;
- Frends enabled data-driven leadership by gathering data into a single data source in a commensurate format.
Key factors for choosing Frends:
- Frends Community: Energy companies may share Frends process templates;
- Frends's architecture enables Frends Agents to continue running on-premises even if the Azure would cease to work. The ability to execute without a public cloud is a regulated requirement for energy companies in Finland;
- Total-cost-ownership is great;
- Productivity via a low-code approach to integrations;
- Possibility to expand existing Frends Task libraries by code - though no expansions haven't been done as Frends's inclusive set of ready-made tasks and connectors have fulfilled all the needs so far.