Finavia

Lacking real-time visibility

Finavia operates on 25 Finnish airports across the country, and the airports are yearly used by over 22 million passengers.

In the beginning, the Airport Operations Center (APOC) has been managing all airport operations and incidents reactively over a fixed phone line or email. There was no real-time visibility for all the 12 airport operational units and processes – often co-operated with other stakeholders such as airlines, ground handlers and authorities. In 2018, it was time for a digital change.

“What we wanted to develop and achieve was a shared situational awareness among stakeholders”, says Heikki Koski, the Chief Digital Officer at Finavia and Helsinki Airport.

The project was started by looking through various options where there might have been some off-the-shelf solutions for this.

“However, we quickly decided that we need to have custom-built solutions because we have our custom-made processes which are also developing all the time”, Koski tells.

Efficient communications by efficient user-testing

The end solution is an automated, visual and a well-defined system that supports the defined operations process.

Together, Siili and Finavia started an extensive design phase to understand the user requirements and needs. The first versions of the system were developed quite efficiently, to be able to take them into test use and then finalize the solutions based on the collected user feedback. There were many stakeholders to be take into account, as on an airport there are airlines, ground-handling companies, and authorities operating.

“During disruptions we have now many ways to share the information with a community, and really make sure that the people get the information”, Jani Ceder, Head of Airport Operations Center explains.

Best user guidance is unnoticeable

Trust as a cornerstone for co-operation.

“We chose Siili Solutions to be the partner to build the solution. We are looking for partners we can trust. We need to able to trust the planning, the delivery, the quality, and competence of the people, and state of the art understanding where the technological capabilities can go.”

“How to design solutions that are usable and fit for purpose for the end-users. And also keeping in mind the big picture – it’s not just a one single solution, we are an airport which is a digital platform, so we need to develop our asset of digital services. All of the partners were working with must keep that in mind”, Koski says.

Learning is enabled with a good partner

What We Did And How

Service Design
User Research
UX/UI
Cloud Management
Software Development
ES6
Typescript
React
React Native
Redux
Redux Saga
Firebase
Google Cloud
React / React Native