With Frends integration platform, Turku Energia has agile integration development and has modified their old integrations to be more effective.

Challenge of Turku Energia

Turku Energia and its predecessors have been illuminating and heating homes, factories, and offices on the banks of the Aura River in the Turku region, Finland, for over a hundred years, since 1898. Turku Energia’s goal is to be a reliable partner in all of its customers’ energy solutions.

Turku Energia offers its customers the most suitable energy solutions. Turku Energia develops new operating methods, products, and services that improve its customers’ everyday lives. These strategic business goals also place high demands on information management to increase efficiency and quick access to new services to both business and consumer customers. Initially, Turku Energia’s integrations were fragmented, and maintenance was therefore challenging. Integrations had been made in many different ways, including timed scripts and proprietary migration programs by various system vendors.

Selecting a vendor

“We explored many options for implementing a centralized integration platform. We chose Frends because we saw that it allows us to define and manage most of the integrations without the vendor’s consultant work. We had also received good feedback from other Frends customers during the clearing phase,” says Yrjö Kujala, Development Manager at Turku Energia.

“Initially, we got guidance from HiQ on how to use Frends and examples of integrations in the spirit of best practices. With these, we have built all the rest of our own integrations. In the most exotic interfaces, we have received support from the HiQ integration team and examples and ideas on approaching the problem in different ways. In problematic cases, help has come quickly and professionally,” Simo Hoikkala continues.

Results

“The greatest benefit is definitely the transparency to interfaces, which means we can see the state of all critical integrations from one place. This also gives us more control over what information is exchanged between the systems and how the systems link to each other,” says Simo Hoikkala.

For example, there were typically two to three errors per month in the transfer of bank records in the past. Since the introduction of the Frends integration platform, no such error has occurred. Likewise, it takes only minutes to build new file-based integrations compared to the old scripts, which took about days’ work.

With the Frends integration platform, we have developed new integrations in agile ways and made the existing ones more efficient, while REST interfaces have been introduced. This has again enabled the introduction of new interfaces and increased automation in processes, which has increased the efficiency of the work.

About Turku Energia

Turku Energia is the leading energy company in Southwest Finland and one of the largest companies in the field in Finland. We are committed to developing and leading the way in the energy sector. We provide our customer's energy services that improve the environment, quality of life and competitiveness.

Our energy services cover electricity distribution, district heating, cooling and steam, and network contracting and maintenance services for electricity networks, outdoor lighting, and traffic lights. Of the Group's subsidiaries, Turku Energia Sähköverkot Oy builds, maintains and operates its own electricity network in the Turku area. Turun Seudun Kaukolämpö Oy, in turn, transfers district heat from production plants to distribution points.