Involving customers in the development of our digital services

Public procurement is not always straightforward, and the terminology alone can seem quite alien to those who are rarely engaged in it. That does not mean we cannot build our digital services to be as customer-centred and easy to use as possible.

In 2022, the online services at hansel.fi were viewed more than 900,000 times, which means that people are interested in public procurement! Hansel.fi offers the most content to customers who have logged in. We have almost 10,000 registered users, of whom almost 4,000 registered last year. It is therefore essential to make the online service as easy as possible to use for new users as well.

While we would like to be able to serve all our customers in person, it is important that our digital services are available regardless of time and place. Examples of how the hansel.fi service was used in 2022:

• Almost €1.9 billion was spent on joining future joint procurement projects
• Our contractual suppliers reported more than 6 million lines of actual procurements
• Nearly 3,000 individual procurement contracts were put out to tender using our minicompetition tools – Kisa-apuri (Competition Assistant), Tilausajopalvelu (Chartered Vehicle Service), Ajoneuvopalvelu (Vehicle Service) and Cloudia. There were 253 working days in 2022, which adds up to an average of more than 11 minicompetitions per working day.

In addition to our own digital services, we are developing the national hankintailmoitukset.fi service (Hilma) in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance. In 2022, more than 22,500 procurement notices were published on Hilma, with around 300,000 visits every month.

New features based on feedback and statistics

Across all services, a key theme for 2022 was how to genuinely involve the users in the development of our services, and how to select the feedback and suggestions that will deliver the most value to the users.

The most significant change in early 2022 was a major reform of the hansel.fi user interface in February. The reform was based on extensive user interviews, which we used to design the new service concept. Some users were able to give feedback on the reform before it was published.

Since the launch of the revamped service, we have been actively collecting feedback and statistics on the use of the service, and we are constantly improving the user interface based on this data. One example of a feature built based on user feedback is the automatic transfer of contract award notices in minicompetitions from Competition Assistant and Tilausajopalvelu to Hilma.

In late 2022, the interviews and collection of experiences continued with a focus on the guidelines for joint procurement, their use and minicompetitions in hansel.fi. Reforms resulting from these interviews will be published in stages during 2023.

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