Compass Group Finland partnered with Nortal to build a data platform enabling growth and increased operational efficiency.  

Compass Group Finland is one of Finland’s most prominent food service companies, serving clients with €230 million in annual revenue. Their primary business is providing B2B food and multi-services to all sectors in Finland and serve thousands of Finns from kids in nurseries to students in lower and higher education and from working people in lunch restaurants to seniors across the country.

They partnered with Nortal to build data architecture that would allow them to gather mission-critical business insights and make data-driven decisions to further drive growth and operational efficiency.  The result was a data platform that saved on costs and enabled faster innovation, allowing Compass Group to focus on tackling its mission–critical challenges while increasing competitive advantage in a perpetually growing market.

Challenge

A fragmented data landscape slows down the speed of innovation, creating bottlenecks that slow development. 

In late 2019, Compass Group reached out to Nortal to build an integration from their previous reporting system to their new CRM. The goal was to successfully transfer data and eventually eliminate the old reporting system entirely. After this project’s successful completion, Compass Group wanted to figure out how they could use this data to better solve their most mission-critical business challenges. The challenge was a scattered data landscape with no centralized system or workflows that would allow for easy data retrieval.  

As with most other large service companies, Compass Group has hundreds of stakeholders and organizations within its orbit. All of them have their own data in fragmented places. There is no way to centralize this information to get a cohesive understanding of what’s going on and, therefore, make the right business decisions – fast. This slows the speed of innovation and creates unnecessary bottlenecks hindering development. 

Solution

A centralized data platform hosting Compass Group Finland’s data and intelligence. 

As a solution, we built a data platform that functioned as the central ecosystem of Compass Group Finland’s data and intelligence. It hosted all domains – from customer to financial, HR, sales, and procurement data – while allowing incoming data flow from various source systems. The platform enables all modeling and publishing to happen directly within this same system, with system-specific data being turned into easily understood concepts.  

The data platform and all related services were built on Azure. Moving it away from physical data centers to a cloud environment simplified the architecture significantly and helped save on costs.  

"Ongoing support from Nortal has been excellent, and we have been able to add new data sources and integrations to our solution easily", Pekka Hytönen, Senior Manager, D&T Transformation and IT Operations, Compass Group Finland Oy

Impact

Quick data-driven decision–making allows for faster innovation and positive environmental impacts. 

The impact of this data architecture project has been felt across many areas of the business. The elimination of Compass Group’s old reporting system and the transfer of data from centers into the cloud slashed costs significantly. With the centralized data platform, Compass Group can now retrieve information to make data-driven business decisions in record time. Rather than spending months piecing together different data sets to get an answer to a question, Compass Group can now turn to the platform for near-immediate results.  

Compass Group can allocate resources, manage waste, and fine-tune food orders much more efficiently with precise, up-to-date data. Customers also benefit from the additional insight, with the company being able to list ingredient and sourcing details on menus. This newfound visibility also has an environmental impact. With more visibility into supply chains, the company has a better understanding of where raw materials come. This enables them to make strategic interventions and more eco-conscious choices where possible. 

A solid technical foundation enables the leadership team to tackle business needs quickly and with agility – ensuring they can stay ahead of the competition with a high rate of innovation. 

"Looking backward, a couple of years after the solution was deployed, we can say that it has proven to be robust, reliable, scalable, and flexible to adjust to our needs"; says Pekka Hytönen, Senior Manager, D&T Transformation and IT Operations, Compass Group Finland Oy