ISS saves hundreds of hours working time by modernizing its data platform and customer reporting

ISS

ISS, Finland's leading workplace experience and facility management company, is renewing its customer reporting with our help. ISS is a Danish company with 320 000 employees and more than 40 000 customer companies in 30 countries.

Digitalization and artificial intelligence are changing the real estate services sector, and the requirements for developing customer reporting, including sustainability, are becoming increasingly pressing. The reporting method previously used at ISS was fragmented and outdated, and the aim was to bring reporting into the 2020s using Microsoft Fabric.

Lassi Lapinmäki, Head of Business Operations IT at ISS, who led the project at ISS as Project Manager, says that the project's goal was to save employee time by improving the efficiency of compiling metrics and report building.

ISS provides facility management services to its customers, which are agreed upon in a service contract. The service contract also includes KPIs, which are monitored with the customer. In the past, every customer account organization has reported KPIs to the customer in its own way; there was no standardized process, and the amount of work was high. Compiling reports required a lot of manual work with Excel and PowerPoint, and the aim was to move away from this to real-time and automated reporting.

The first step was to work on customer reports for ISS’ major industrial customer. The new customer reporting solution will serve as a standardized solution that can be expanded to cover all of ISS's customer accounts and key accounts and tailored to specific customer needs.

"The aim was to make visible to our customer what we do for them and their costs. We need a similar reporting solution for our other large customers and will continue working on it. This project was a pilot with iterations and lessons learned, and we will use the results in the future project," Lapinmäki says.

Reporting solution focuses on confidentiality and security

The volume of data and its location added its own twist to the project. One of the biggest challenges was managing the data of a large organization like ISS when the data also comes from customers' systems.

"We work at the interface of the customer's systems and physically at the customer's premises. When data comes from our and customers' systems, we must ensure we don't duplicate things on reports. And then, on the other hand, the customers can be quite specific about what we integrate into their systems."

"When you're working on customer premises and systems, it is important to consider confidentiality and security and understand that we're not just dealing with our data, even if it's related to our business. We must consider that when building systems and also in the day-to-day operations," says Lapinmäki.

A new customer reporting tool brings savings and makes work easier

The reporting solution's architecture was built on Microsoft Fabric, and the data in ISS's systems was moved to the cloud in Fabric. In addition, a Power Apps implementation was built to feed data from the customer's systems into Microsoft Fabric. This was a way to address data fragmentation, as automated integrations to customer systems were outside the scope of this project.

"In Fabric, we orchestrated data and transformed it to be in the right hierarchy and ready for reporting. On top of that, a reporting implementation was created using PowerBI, where the metrics agreed with the client are presented in a visual format. We made a 360-degree view to have transparent, real-time and consistent reporting," says Lapinmäki.

The reports cover areas such as property maintenance, quality of service and work safety. Compared to the previous method of reporting, the new system provides better access to billing data, goals and their setting, and trends, which can easily provide customers with the forecasts. The new system will also enable ISS customers to access the reporting portal according to their needs.

"The new system has brought reporting into the 2020s. It's a huge thing for us to be able to show customers trends: where we've been and where we're going and compare that to the previous period. We have also made goals and goal setting visible and made it possible to track progress against them. Of course, we have tracked goals before, but it has not been visually easy to digest," says Lapinmäki.

ISS has calculated that the new system will, at best, save ISS account managers about a day of working time per month and the ISS service organization hundreds of hours per year.

"Our customer has also been happy with the reporting solution, and the transparency in their direction has increased dramatically as they can see the work done and their invoices in our system. We hope this will increase our customers' commitment, as transparency also increases trust," says Lapinmäki.

Agile collaboration with twoday

twoday was chosen to provide a reporting solution for ISS because we had strong experience working with ISS and their data for over 10 years, for example, from a previous project developing an internal reporting tool. Our insight and knowledge of Microsoft Fabric also convinced ISS.

"In the spring of 2024, when the project started, Microsoft Fabric was still a new solution that not everyone offered yet. We and twoday had a shared vision that Fabric could be the way of the future for reporting, and they had the capability to take the project in the direction we wanted."

"twoday had a small and committed team, and we worked closely with them in an iterative and agile way. The focus was on getting things done rather than building unnecessary bureaucracy. The key to success was understanding the data and our company's architecture, hierarchies and environment," Lapinmäki says.

Although the implementation has been complex from the point of view of ISS’ key customer’s corporate structure and hierarchy, and there have been many things to be defined, the project has remained well on schedule and within budget. ISS is pleased with the project so far but is already eagerly looking forward to the next phase to make the reporting solution available for other customers and thus achieve significant cost savings in the future.