METSÄÄN.FI TO BE RENEWED BY BITCOMP AND SITOWISE
Bitcomp will renew the Finnish Forest Centre’s Metsään.fi service with Sitowise
Finland’s largest and best-known digital service for forest owners Metsään.fi will be renewed. Administrated by The Finnish Forest Centre, Metsään.fi is a public service open for all Finnish forest owners. Both accurate forest information and public services can be accessed through a single system. The service is free of charge. In it a forest owner can examine the information of their forest estates as well as plan the care of their forest property.
The new Metsään.fi 2.0 will be a platform independent service that will bring together forest owners and forestry professionals. The service will allow applying for grants that are in accordance with the new incentive scheme Metka.
The fact that Metka legislation will replace the Act on the Financing of Sustainable Forestry (Kemera) in the beginning of 2024 is a key factor in why Metsään.fi has to be renewed. The application features have to be redone to adjust to the change. Additionally, the technical platform of the current Metsään.fi service is at the end of its lifecycle.
Fluent Services Encourage to Take Care of Forests
“The new Metsään.fi 2.0 service will be built to meet today’s needs for usability. The new digital service will be even better at activating forest owners to do forest management decisions”, summarizes Jani Heikkilä, Sales Director at Bitcomp.
The most visible change for the usability is that the service is designed to be used also on a mobile device.
“The views in the service will be executed so that the service can be used also on field. There is no need for a separate application,” Heikkilä relates.
When designing the system, attention is paid to the communication inside the service. The objective is to make business between forest owners and for example forest service companies and timber traders easier.
“In the future, Metsään.fi will also be even more of a meeting place. When a forest owner leaves a contact request through the service, the request will reach a service provider and lead to the beginning of a business process,” Heikkilä explains the goals.
Running Errands Digitally Will Become Easier for Forest Owners
The most important thing for the user is making the digital services easier to use, the R&D Director of the Finnish Forest Centre Tapani Hämäläinen also emphasizes.
“Moving forward, the service can be accessed on any device, whereas the current service is designed to be used on a desktop. In the future we can offer even better digital service for forest owners and forest sector parties. It was also important for the Forest Centre that the service is executed on AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud service, as per the cloud strategy of the Forest Centre.”
The renewal is part of Forest Centre’s digitalization roadmap, in which all of its operative systems will be renewed by the end of the year 2023. The Finnish Forest Centre is part of indirect public administration.
Signing the contract, from left to right: Business Director of Digital Solutions Teemu Virtanen from Sitowise, R&D Director Tapani Hämäläinen from the Finnish Forest Centre, Managing Director Tapani Stjernvall and Sales Director Jani Heikkilä from Bitcomp, Director of Finnish Forest Centre Ari Eini and Director of Digital Solutions Mikko Ristikangas from Sitowise.
Based on Strong GIS Expertise
The current Metsään.fi service has around 100 000 users and during 2020 there were over 300 000 logins to the service. Bitcomp designs the new web service together with one of Finland’s leading GIS based service providers, Sitowise Oy. The value of the project including the maintenance and further development is around 3,1 million euros.
“For a long time already, we have created different kinds of smart city solutions for living environments. We see forest property as an essential part of this entity. We already are one of the leading providers on GIS based systems for the built environment and transport, and now we combine our strengths with a forest sector top player Bitcomp to further digitalization in forest sector,” says Mikko Ristikangas, the Director of Digital Solutions at Sitowise.
The design process for Metsään.fi 2.0 service will begin in the summer of 2022. The new service will be employed by the end of 2023 as the old service will be put out of use.
