The Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency (FTIA) needed an efficient and functional cooperation platform for a roadwork project. SokoPro customised its services to meet the FTIA’s needs. The successful partnership generated an updated service that meets all expectations, along with providing good insights into SokoPro’s product development.
Finnish national road 12, the southern ring road of Lahti, is one of the few main roads that run through a dense residential area. The planning of a new, safer alternate route south of Lahti has been pending more than 50 years.
Had the project been kicked off when it was originally being planned in the 60s, managing, distributing and archiving the relevant information would surely have required stacks of paper and binders, as well as plenty of physical space.
Looking back 50 years, or even ten years really, we find a time when printouts, copies and envelopes were prevalent over comprehensive electronic services. Much has changed since then. Today, we try to avoid unnecessary printouts wherever we can and process information mainly through cloud services. It is particularly important to ensure that the necessary information does not need to be retrieved from multiple sources.
“For us at the FTIA, it’s important to ensure that people can do as many things as possible through the same electronic platform. SokoPro has been able to meet this need extremely well, which is why we use the services,” Project Manager Juha-Pekka Hämäläinen says.
Work on the southern ring road of Lahti began in 2018, and efficient electronic systems were needed for the worksite. The sizeable project package was divided into three contracts, which is why the management, distribution and archiving of information needed to be as straightforward as possible.
The FTIA is responsible for the development and repair of the national road network and is involved in the national road 12 project as one of the commissioning parties together
with the Municipality of Hollola and City of Lahti. The FTIA has been using SokoPro particularly as an internal project portal for the client.
“The total volume of information in a project such as this is immense and there are many parties involved. The challenge was being able to restrict access to the information to the desired parties,” says Juha-Pekka Hämäläinen of the FTIA.
According to Hämäläinen, there have been no problems with implementing access restrictions on information and files in SokoPro.
SokoPro and the FTIA began their cooperation in 2014, and the years since then have served to build a mutual trust. The key to the smooth partnership has been open communication. Juha-Pekka Hämäläinen says he has sent development suggestions to SokoPro many times over the years, and the response has always been positive.
“When we’ve sent development suggestions that have been found useful, they have been mobilised as system features, which has also made them available to other SokoPro customers,” Hämäläinen specifies.
It is important to listen to the customer, because a proper understanding of the customer’s needs steers development in the right direction. Fernando Korpi, who is in charge of product development at SokoPro, mentions that, at its best, collaboration is a process of learning.
“It’s been very rewarding working with the innovative experts at the FTIA. We now have a better understanding of the needs of modern infrastructure construction.”
During the project, the SokoPro system has been updated to better meet the wishes and expectations of the FTIA. Due to a legislative change, the FTIA also needed an electronic tool for organising competitive tendering for project operators. The organisation also hoped to get the “two-stage tendering” process in electronic form. This is a practice applied by the FTIA to ensure that tenders consider quality before price. The process is now part of the SokoPro tendering tool.
When speaking of the challenges and successes of the project, both Fernando Korpi of SokoPro and Juha-Pekka Hämäläinen of the FTIA both mention the development of the electronic tendering tool. The large competitive tendering processes implemented through the FTIA system went as planned, after which development has been continued in collaboration. It is clear that this has been the greatest challenge and success for the SokoPro project.
“During the competitive tendering processes, many things could have gone wrong with the system, but fortunately that didn’t happen. Everything worked impeccably,” Hämäläinen says with a chuckle.
The years of cooperation have yielded many benefits for the FTIA and SokoPro. The FTIA gained access to the tools it needed for distributing, archiving and managing information, and creating electronic invitations to tender. SokoPro has specialised in information processing for as long as 20 years. The collaboration with the FTIA has opened up new perspectives into business and future product development.
“The notion that we could collaborate with other applications and operators through open interfaces is groundbreaking to SokoPro’s product development,” Fernando Korpi says
Photo source: FTIA’s photo archive
The term ‘open interface’ refers to how programs produced by different companies work and communicate together. Products from multiple separate software developers are often used for larger projects. Smooth data transfer between programs would further facilitate customers’ day-to-day activities and accelerate processes.
The national road 12 project is still ongoing, and the SokoPro system has already been used to archive gigabytes of FTIA documents and other data. If everything goes according to plan, the new road sections in the Lahti and Hollola region will be opened for traffic towards the end of 2020. Transport, technological development and the completion of large projects require collaboration between many parties and fields.
