Napapiirin Energia ja Vesi Oy (Neve) is a Lapland multi-business group in the arctic circular economy, serving over 60,000 local customers and hundreds of thousands of tourists.
Neve's comprehensive service range includes electricity transmission, water utilities, district-heat production, services and sales, infrastructure services, fiber-network construction and services, e-mobility services, digital services and circular-economy products.
In the system-renewal project launched last June, Softera delivered the Softera T360° operational system to Neve, uniting previously scattered systems, processes and data into a view one click away.
"The T360° whole delivered to Neve includes customer management, quotes, the order/delivery process, work management and billing. Outage and fault management and customer-feedback and complaint processes will be added soon. The latter are key functions especially for the fiber business, but they also help manage the whole of the other businesses."
Recommendations convinced them
Softera develops and maintains business support systems for customer interactions, customer management and billing. The customers of the software company — owned by nine local telecom operators — include DNA and MPY, for whom Softera has delivered BSS systems.
Neve became interested in Softera T360° after talking with Softera's fiber-business customers KaisaNet and Lounea. A system demo that walked through the pain points in Neve's processes and the solutions Softera offered for them finally convinced Neve about Softera T360°, which also provides advanced tools for flexible product management and campaign upkeep.
"We rolled up our sleeves and started the project in early June. As the customer's old CRM was being retired at the end of August, we scheduled the project so that customer and product management and the order–delivery process were in the customer's use in August, and the billing system later in the autumn on a separately agreed schedule."
Synergy benefits from consistency
Softera carried out the migration of Neve's old systems and the CRM mass data transfer according to a jointly agreed plan.
"Neve told us how they wanted the system to work, and we explained how the system's standardised operating model can be modified per customer. The system's consistency brings customers clear benefits and synergies, because Softera T360° is developed continuously and systematically. Its updates and new features always reach all customers at the same time," Nurmesniemi says.
"Our goal was a system that unifies the fiber network's overall processes and billing. We are still in the learning phase with Softera T360°, but even after a short time in use it has been found excellent and reliable. Customer service has become more efficient now that customer data, quotes, orders, work status and billing live in the same system — at the sales team's fingertips."
Neve's CIO Hannu Vaara is also pleased with the project.
"This is a textbook example of a business-driven IT project. We will use the lessons learned here in our other IT projects too."
Although the project has already reached the finish line, the partners' cooperation continues. "Our maintenance and support services are available to the customer every business day, and system development is done continuously, listening to customers," Nurmesniemi concludes.
