Foundation for a data-driven, customer-oriented company
SATO selected Loihde Factor to help build a data-driven and customer-oriented SATO. The first phase of the journey was to lay the foundation for data-driven management.
“The importance of data in business has increased significantly, which means that we must do something about the unstable data platform and make the use of data more systematic,” says Henna Laaksonen. Henna leads SATO’s data and analytics development team and describes the situation before the project. “Old-fashioned technology, slowness and several system failures caused the business to often rely on old data.” It was imperative for SATO to stabilize the situation by finding modern solutions.
SATO selected Loihde Factor to help build a data-driven and customer-oriented SATO. The first phase of the journey was to lay the foundation for data-driven management.
The SATO Group is one Finland’s leading apartment rental companies. The company’s mission is to build thriving and vibrant cities and neighborhoods where people are comfortable. SATO develops its services with a customer-oriented mentality and strives towards process automation and more efficient real estate maintenance and management. The company has already adopted data-driven practices that Sato employees now wanted to streamline and expand.
The modern data platform was created in cooperation
Loihde Factor formed a team with SATO, which set out to build a foundation for data-driven management. The team brought together experts from the company’s various businesses in workshops to establish an overall picture of the current situation, data use, prevailing problems and the underlying causes. With the understanding of the nature of the problems, the team designed a vision for the role of data in the company and the possibilities of utilizing the data for different businesses. This created guidelines for the customer-oriented and data-driven SATO.
Upgrading the data warehousing and reporting solution was one of the company’s clear needs. Downloads often failed due to various errors, and it was impossible to run heavy tasks during the work day. Business could not rely on the data because the data was incomplete and old. In order to keep the business running smoothly, changes had to be made. The Loihde Factor team planned and implemented an Azure-based cloud platform with Snowflake data warehouse for SATO. This replaced old distributed data warehousing with one automatically scaling cloud service platform.
Henna Laaksonen explains the outcomes of the first phase of the project: “Now we have entered the development stage and we don’t have to monitor whether platform is working or not.” The company’s technical foundation is now stable and teams can move on to smarter data-driven management. SATO’s development has accelerated in several areas. The company is constantly applying more advanced analytics to a larger and more diverse amount of data. SATO has taken the first steps towards advanced analytics by stabilizing the data and analytics environment. Cooperation with Loihde Factor continues, and the analytics roadmap is filling up rapidly.
External help can clarify the overall picture
In a rapidly modernizing competitive field, it is critical that the company’s resources are used correctly. Companies invest heavily in skilled development teams, but often basic technical problems take up significant amounts of valuable time and intellectual resources. Loihde Factor’s teams have experience of these kinds of moments of change. External experiences can summarize development problems into manageable entities, bring new perspectives to development prospects, accelerate change, and free up resources for new development.
Want to hear how Loihde Factor’s teams have clarified different data and analytics development paths? Perhaps the kind of paths you have ahead of you? Contact us and we’ll set up a meeting.