About the project
What is Fortum?
Fortum is a global energy company with core operations in ten countries. It is among the top ten biggest companies in Finland and serves 2.5 million consumer clients worldwide in the field of electricity, among others.
Objectives
Fortum was looking for an agile, diversified partner who could offer continuous readiness. The partner had to be able to quickly respond to the targets for development and changing needs of its digital services. The aim was to find a technical development partner to implement digital service projects but also drive the continuous development of the services. The core values of Fortum include environmental responsibility and sustainability, so the substantial reduction in the carbon footprint of the sites, made possible by their development, was an extremely welcome improvement.
The challenge
Fortum needed a plan for its Drupal 8-based multisite setup to make the web services accessible, faster, and easier to host within a convenient schedule. An additional twist to the project came from ensuring adequate development capacity. Fortum has several business units in multiple market areas, each with its own unique needs with various features and country-specific integrations. Over time, the targets for development in the different business units have caused a long backlog. The new web service partner would have to be able to effectively reduce this backlog and prevent a similar situation from occurring in the future.
Fortum also needed a hosting service that would better meet its needs and be more cost-effective. Due to the high data security requirements of the energy industry, it was challenging to find a hosting partner that would meet all these requirements.
A further consideration in terms of the development requirements is the Accessibility Directive, which also applies to energy suppliers. A thorough report about the state of Fortum’s web services accessibility had to be prepared, including proposals for improvement and implementations.
The solution
In order to examine the web services’ current state and identify their strengths and targets for development, Fortum ordered a Drupal audit on its sites from two providers (one of which was Mearra). Following the audit by Mearra’s technical architect, Fortum chose Mearra to continue the implementation as the technical partner of its web services.
It was important for Fortum to find a service provider whose team its own developer could merge into. Mearra offered Fortum a collaboration model that comes with a dedicated team to deal with both the project implementations and continuous development.
A key component in improving the multisite setup was the adoption of Mearra’s own hosting infrastructure, Silta. Silta was the right answer to all the strict data security requirements and lightened the hosting load significantly – not to mention being much most cost-effective than the previous hosting service. Silta also enabled to reduce the carbon footprint of the web services, and by optimizing the websites, the carbon dioxide emissions were reduced even more.
Although we at Mearra appointed a dedicated team to develop Fortum’s web services, the work is backed up by our entire pool of experts whose special expertise can always be harnessed to support the team when needed. Thanks to our more than 100 Mearra people, we can find the perfect person for every job, and the backlog will not become overwhelming at any point.
The results
The partnership of Fortum and Mearra is an excellent example of what can be achieved when you combine great teamwork and the expertise of some of the top experts in their field. While the overflowing backlog was successfully picked up in record time thanks to seamless collaboration, Fortum’s 14 sites were transferred under Mearra’s hosting and continuous development services. With the help of the information and targets for development identified during the security audit, the security of the sites has been further improved. Also, the results of the accessibility audit are driving development towards a more accessible overall solution.
Following the brilliant, productive start, the gaze has now been turned towards upcoming projects.
The collaboration, which has lasted for about a year, has been extended to developing a campaign site platform, separated from the main site. In addition to setting up marketing websites, the same platform is also convenient to use as a prototype for the front-end improvements of the main site, and the idea is to later move content management tools from the platform to the main site.
