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Case Visit Finland

More sustainable travel with data – Visit Finland utilises Power BI reports in diverse ways

Visit Finland, an organisation that promotes tourism in Finland in various ways, was looking for a partner to create Power BI reports that are uniform in terms of content and presentation and measure things like the development of sustainable travel in Finland. Digia provided Visit Finland with reports that track the progress of digitalisation and sustainable development in the travel industry.

 

Visit Finland is part of Business Finland and has the purpose of helping Finnish tourist areas and travel businesses develop, sell and market different travel products. Sustainable travel is a central and guiding theme of Visit Finland’s operations, and Visit Finland’s aim is to make Finland the world’s leading sustainable travel destination by 2025. To achieve this aim, Visit Finland has created the Sustainable Travel Finland (STF) label, which travel businesses can display free of charge by completing a seven-step sustainable travel development programme.

The development of sustainable travel is driven by knowledge, which is why Visit Finland has launched extensive development projects aimed at collecting, utilising and reporting data. The development of knowledge-based management is led by Katarina Wakonen, who is in charge of Visit Finland’s travel statistics and research and explains that this is a theme that runs through the entire organisation. Knowledge-based management is a method of meeting targets and confirming results.

What we did

  • data reporting model that is uniform in terms of content and presentation
  • technical concept for a future data portal

What we used

  • Microsoft Power BI
  • analytics

Projects like this inevitably involve lots of unknowns, which is why estimating the final scope of the work is difficult. From our perspective, it was extremely useful that Digia’s team was able to be flexible and make sure the end result met our goals. At the same time, we also learned a lot about managing the reports’ development projects with an eye on future tenders.


Katarina Wakonen, Head of Business Intelligence, Visit Finland

Digia’s understanding of the subject was convincing right from the tendering stage

Reporting is an important tool for measuring the progress of development projects but is also invaluable when it comes to communicating with stakeholders and the media. Previously, Visit Finland had relied on Power BI reports created in house, but the growing future need for different reports led them to the conclusion that they needed a data reporting model that was uniform in terms of content and presentation. It was decided that it would be best to find a partner to implement this model.

The organisation set up a reduced competitive tendering process within the framework agreement to find a partner to implement the reports. Digia stood out as the best option during the tendering by displaying a comprehensive understanding of Visit Finland’s requirements and a vision of how the project could be implemented.

Two Power BI reports and a technical concept for a future data portal became the objects of development

The DataHub report and STF report were chosen as the first development focuses. The reports serve as Visit Finland’s internal indicators but also as tools for communicating with stakeholders and the general public.

DataHub is a database maintained by Visit Finland where Finnish travel businesses can save data about their company and products and make that data available to third parties through interfaces. The DataHub report contains information about the database’s contents and development. The STF report is similar to the DataHub report but, as the name suggests, it focuses on companies that have been granted the STF label.

A technical concept that will be at the core of Visit Finland’s upcoming data portal was chosen as the third development focus. The concept is an online service that collects all Visit Finland’s current and future Power BI reports and their key figures into one place and allows users to view the relevant reports simply by clicking on the key figures.

Working with Digia was extremely instructive

Overall, knowledge-based management involves continuous development that consists of several different dimensions. Wakonen gives Digia’s team particular praise for their excellent project work and communication during the collaboration.

“Projects like this inevitably involve lots of unknowns, which is why estimating the final scope of the work is difficult. From our perspective, it was extremely useful that Digia’s team was able to be flexible and make sure the end result met our goals. At the same time, we also learned a lot about managing the reports’ development projects with an eye on future tenders,” Wakonen says.

The lessons learned from Digia will be put to good use in future reporting projects

Knowledge-based management is an important theme in everything Visit Finland and its parent organisation Business Finland do. The development of data management models, data storage and utilisation, data analytics and reporting are key areas of development in both organisations, and each smaller development project is tracked closely.

Wakonen believes that the lessons learned from working with Digia will prove valuable in Visit Finland and Business Finland’s future reporting development projects.

“Digia is an excellent partner for us. The reports they produce serve our purposes well, and we got exactly the unified visual concept we were looking for. What I think is even more important, though, are the lessons we learned from working with Digia’s team that will help us organise our future projects,” Wakonen concludes.