YIT

Datahub transformed data into a strategic asset for YIT

YIT, Finland’s largest construction company, wanted to strengthen their competitive edge by remodeling the entire organisation towards a more data-driven direction. To enable this transformation, YIT and Solita built a modern data platform, YIT Datahub. Datahub brings all the data from business units onto one platform. It provides YIT with real-time visibility into their business and customers, helps to predict the future and create new products and services. Data is now a valuable strategic asset driving daily operations.

YIT is a significant player in the Northern European market, developing and building apartments, business premises, and demanding infrastructure projects in 11 countries.

In 2015, YIT created an initiative to allow their business and organisation to become more data-driven. YIT has a huge amount of data on, for example, housing sales, building projects and customers in various systems. The difficulty was getting reliable, real-time information to improve operations and react more quickly to customer needs. The construction business is highly market sensitive, with a large ecosystem of partners and subcontractors, so it is crucial to have clear insight into the current situation and be able to predict the future accurately.

Business benefits of Datahub platform:

Better decision-making: data gathered from various sources
Improved service quality: modelling, understanding and reacting to customer needs in real-time
Better designed buildings for customers
More efficient building process: easier to find and combine project data
Faster reporting: saving hundreds of hours of work monthly and receiving, for example, customer feedback reports 100x faster
More customer-focused development culture
Increased housing sales: data enables more targeted sales and marketing actions

Datahub brings all data onto one platform

To utilize this data and ensure a solid foundation for transformation, YIT started an initiative to develop Datahub. This modern data platform enables YIT to centralize data for all their business units. It covers both master data management, enterprise data warehousing and integrations.

YIT Datahub is built on Microsoft Azure, which is YIT’s strategic cloud platform solution. Solita develops the data platform together with YIT’s business and analytics professionals. Agile teams deliver tangible benefits to end-users every two weeks.

“The architecture of Datahub has proven to be solid as it hasn’t changed significantly over time. We’ve been able to smoothly change many components to be more advanced, making Datahub constantly evolving.

Besides technology, the development of corporate data culture is vital to succeeding, requiring everybody to have an agile mindset to challenge themselves and welcome new ideas.

Solita’s professionals of various expertise have had a significant role in building YIT Datahub as well as helping to build the data culture in YIT. Moreover, they have always been fun and easy to work with”, says Jarkko Peltola, Enterprise Architect, Data & Analytics at YIT.

Solita's professionals have had a significant role in building Datahub as well as in helping to build the data culture.Jarkko Peltola, Enterprise Architect, Data & Analytics, YIT

Data is now a strategic asset

Now Datahub is a strategic asset that provides a real competitive edge to YIT. Datahub enables YIT to work as one unit across countries. It provides more accurate data to predict the business in the future.

“Datahub enables YIT to have a single truth to project data in the YIT portfolio. It provides the same datasets to both front line employees and management level analytics to ensure data quality and correctness throughout the organisation. This helps to maintain process quality, create trust into data and allows the creation of predictive models based on real time internal and external data input from the construction projects and the business environment.

Having high internal confidence in our data, it enables YIT to confidently share it with partners through APIs and even to automate processes across company borders or through digital platforms”, says Mikko Kuusakoski, Head of Data & Analytics at YIT.

YIT now has real-time visibility of customer satisfaction and quality at all levels of the organization. Business units gain valuable insight for service and product development and can react faster to customer feedback and market changes in both building projects and sales. In addition to Datahub, the shift to a data-driven mindset has been huge. Users throughout YIT have given positive feedback on the impact Datahub has had on their daily work and business success.

“Data enables us to predict sales better. Before we had to make estimates with gut feeling. Now we can follow sales opportunities and we have a high-level manager who follows sales on a country level. This gives us better insight about sales, and this helps us proactively focus our sales efforts.”
– Sales Manager

“Knowledge from apartment sales gives us valuable insight. We see better the actual demand and the changes done to apartments we have built. Now when we build a new project, we can use this data to build apartments according to real customer demand and therefore lower the amount of changes.”
– Construction Project Engineer

Datahub consists of four parts:

Analytics. Datahub analytics provides business with modern tools and analytics solutions to fully utilize the power of centralized data assets.
Integrations. Previously, the integrations between various systems and data sources were implemented using multiple platforms, and mainly as point to point solutions. This was not as effective as now, with Azure as the common platform.
Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Enterprise data warehouse combines data from different sources to build a centralized, source system independent and business modelled data asset for the whole of YIT.
Master Data Management (MDM) Platform. A unified master data management platform for managing and distributing harmonized master data assets across YIT Group to support analytical and operative functions.

Technologies and ways of working