Platform for data-driven decision making

Pohjolan Voima, one of Finland’s largest energy producers, produces energy, electricity, and heat for its owner organisations. Pohjolan Voima is on top of the transformation in the energy business and is focusing its strategy on increasing carbon-neutral production and growing need for reactive power capacity.

Pohjolan Voima sees itself as a bold and open-minded actor. One example of the ambition of the company is that Pohjolan Voima aims towards 99% carbon-neutral electricity production by 2025. Development processes are long and complicated and require not only technical and equipment-related investments but also new ideas and knowledge to make the most of technical solutions.

According to Petri Nampajärvi, Chief Information Officer of Pohjolan Voima, and Marita Peltokoski, Finance Business Partner, data-driven decision making, and the utilisation of information are strongly present in all the company's operations.

However, the previous, existing data environment did not meet Pohjolan Voima's need to combine information from a wide range of sources. The amount of manual work was large, and it was difficult to add new data sources. There were no capabilities to utilise the data from the power plant's production systems. Reporting the data quickly and a deeper analysis of the data was not possible.

"I would recommend Kaito especially to organisations who don’t have enough specific knowhow themselves – Kaito is an excellent  company to bring in the missing expertise." – Petri Nampajärvi, Chief Information Officer, Pohjolan Voima

The company was searching for an effective solution and, above all, a good partner that could deliver the desired capabilities – the real added value would come from combining the plant data with other data sources.

Together with Pohjolan Voima, Kaito built a modern data platform that adapts flexibly to many future needs. The data is combined and stored in a cloud-native Snowflake data warehouse, where it is processed into valuable information using WhereScape data warehouse automation solution. In addition, there is a wide range of modern micro-services that are used to refine and modify the information.

Kaito Insight offers agile ways to utilise information in practice

A very comprehensive study was carried out between different suppliers, of which Kaito Insight proved to be of suitable size and motivated. Kaito has deep technical knowledge, but also valuable experience from operating in similar projects in sev-eral large companies. One of the main factors behind the selection was that Kaito has great enthusiasm for developing Pohjolan Voima's business.

Kaito has provided Pohjolan Voima with agile and practical approaches for utilising information. The cooperation has worked very well, and it is very positive that Kaito's experience helps to expand Pohjolan Voima's expertise and highlight new perspectives.

The starting point has been to develop a single data platform that serves all needs. After launching the common platform, it has been possible to focus on new activities, i.e., integrating the power plant data and retrieving and utilising it in the future for real-time decision making.

"As a financial data expert, when I investigated more closely at one specific company's bills in our new reporting solution, I noticed how easy it is to drill into data – this brings clear help to running the everyday business and ad hoc analysis, etc., which is a very clear improvement." – Marita Peltokoski, Finance Business Partner, Pohjolan Voima

In the future, Pohjolan Voima aims to be a highly data-driven organisation that can very quickly analyse plant data in production companies, combine it with other data and react better in advance. Data-driven decision-making and continuous improvement will affect the company's business at all levels.

"Kaito has competent, innovative, and easy to work with experts with whom to move things forward – I think our business and corporate structure have been understood and taken over quickly and well." – Marita Peltokoski, Finance Business Partner, Pohjolan Voima