The City of Hamina has been a customer of Softwave since 2021. Currently, the organization uses the Opiferus® product family, including the Financial Document and Financial Planning solutions. The Opiferus® Management Dashboard is still in its implementation phase.
– “I first heard about the Opiferus® solutions from Sami Tikkanen, the Director of Ekami, the Kotka-Hamina Region Educational Federation of Municipalities. He mentioned being a satisfied user of these solutions. As I was working on developing data-driven management at the time, I decided to look into the matter further. I later received positive feedback from colleagues in Kalajoki as well. I shared my findings within our organization, and we became genuinely interested in Softwave and their Opiferus® product family. Our collaboration with the Softwave team officially began in the fall of 2021,” recalls Pia Nordman, Director of Participation for the City of Hamina.
In the fall of 2022, the City of Hamina began piloting Opiferus® Financial Planning as support for their previous system was ending.
– “I believe that in 99% of municipalities, an enormous amount of manual work is done in financial management. For example, interim financial reports are prepared by modifying exported financial data in Excel and using copy-paste techniques, which is not productive administrative work,” says Olli Vilen, Hamina’s Finance Director.
Vilen is highly satisfied with the current situation; financial data flows seamlessly into the Opiferus® solutions from the old source system, and the integration works exceptionally well. He especially appreciates how Opiferus® Financial Document and its integrated Financial Planning have eliminated the need for manual copy-paste work. Vilen highlights that changes made to budget allocations at the cost center level are automatically updated in the financial statements of the cost area and the entire city.
“Opiferus® Financial Document and Financial Planning are truly advanced solutions.”
OLLI VILEN, FINANCE DIRECTOR, CITY OF HAMINA
– “We started preparing our 2023 budget using Opiferus® Financial Planning, but due to time constraints, we couldn’t complete the entire document. However, we now have excellent templates ready for the 2024 budget, which will be fully prepared using the Opiferus® Financial Planning and Financial Document solutions,” Vilen explains.
This year, Hamina’s March interim financial report was created using Opiferus® Financial Document by transferring actual figures from the accounting system into pre-prepared templates in Financial Planning and Financial Document.
– “We have found the Opiferus® solutions to be excellent, and we haven’t heard of competing products or product families offering similar features. Of course, challenges have arisen; we are still in the early stages of data-driven management. Adopting these solutions takes time, as does learning to use, utilize, and identify all their features. Fortunately, Softwave is a small and agile company, and we have been very satisfied with their customer service and consultative approach during the implementation processes,” note Vilen and Nordman.
They have also identified areas for improvement in the Opiferus® solutions and Softwave’s services, which they address collaboratively with the Softwave team in a spirit of cooperation.
– “Our organization has made a significant digital leap. Thanks to the Opiferus® product family, our interim financial reporting and budget preparation processes have been significantly streamlined, especially with the help of Financial Document – and we haven’t even utilized all the features yet,” says Vilen.
The Opiferus® Management Dashboard is also being introduced to the organization. Metrics have been developed for strategic-level monitoring as well as for regular evaluation of processes. Discussions are ongoing about how to best utilize the solution, what regular metrics to monitor, and how these metrics can guide decision-making. At the unit level, the Management Dashboard is already in use.
– “In the future – when the Management Dashboard is hopefully in use across our entire organization – teams will also be able to use data to track their performance against goals set by managers or leadership. Additionally, we can more easily achieve ‘maximum results with minimum resources’ and monitor aspects like employee well-being,” Nordman notes.
“The Opiferus® Management Dashboard enables significant improvements in leadership efficiency.”
PIA NORDMAN, DIRECTOR OF PARTICIPATION, CITY OF HAMINA
– “Softwave has definitely recognized the challenges associated with municipal financial documents, their preparation, and management dashboards. So, we’re on a very good path. I was very pleased to hear recently that Softwave is working on a ‘Municipal ERP’ project, which involves developing an accounting system tailored to the municipal sector as part of the Opiferus® product family. We have had preliminary discussions with Softwave about Hamina potentially joining this pilot project, which would enable even deeper collaboration and stronger integration between systems in the future,” Vilen concludes.
