“Our mission is to enable value-added services for our owner-customers, who can, in turn, deliver better experiences for their stakeholders: Finnish businesses and taxpayers. In Finland, participatory governance is a key goal, and we are always looking for ways to help our customers involve people more closely in the local government decisions that affect their day-to-day lives,” confirms Vesa Heinälä, Director at Kuntien Tiera Oy.

Targeting digital case management

Many Finnish municipalities are now embracing e-government technologies, moving from paper-based processes to digital workflows. Kuntien Tiera recognized that enabling digital case management was a challenge for many public-sector organizations and looked for a way to close the gap.

“Case management really is a crucial capability. It allows government organizations to drive everything from internal decision-making, documentation and archiving to communicating with and capturing feedback from the general public,” explains Heinälä. “While many municipalities had already adopted digital tools for collaboration, they were still relying on paper to engage with citizens—for example, during consultations on healthcare and education services, and planning permission for building projects.”

Heinälä adds, “In the digital age, we shouldn’t expect citizens to travel to a physical government building if they want to get involved in these planning and decision-making processes. To empower municipalities to solve the challenge, we looked for a trusted partner to help us build a new case management service.”

Building a secure, central solution

After a thorough public tender, Kuntien Tiera selected the Fujitsu CaseM case management solution, with enterprise content management capabilities built on the OpenText™ Documentum™ platform.

“We were looking for a case management platform that is robust and extensible, and that is exactly what the combination of Fujitsu CaseM and OpenText Documentum offers us,” says Heinälä.

“At the front end, we use Fujitsu CaseM to build and deliver standardized workflows for many common case management use cases, which we can tailor to the specific needs of each public-sector customer. Behind the scenes, we leverage the Documentum platform to support the entire content lifecycle, backed by fine-grained versioning and data protection.”

Ensuring seamless scalability

Because Kuntien Tiera delivers services to a wide range of public-sector stakeholders, scalability and cost-effectiveness were essential considerations. With a single-tenant deployment of the Documentum platform hosted at a Fujitsu data center in Finland, the organization can maintain robust information security while ensuring that it can efficiently onboard new customers using best-practice templates.

“Our goal is to deliver case management capabilities to as many municipalities as possible, so we wanted a partner who could support us with that long-term vision,” states Heinälä. “Partnering with Fujitsu Finland and embracing OpenText technology gives us the headroom for long-term growth.”

Boosting engagement and transparency

Today, Kuntien Tiera uses Fujitsu CaseM, powered by Documentum, to support over 40 public-sector organizations across Finland with advanced case management capabilities—contributing to value-added services that increase public engagement in the democratic process.

“We’re continuing to grow our case management platform, and many large and small organizations have joined the platform over the years,” explains Heinälä. “Fujitsu Finland helps us with that process, and together we have developed a very efficient methodology to bring new customers on board. Documentum has never let us down in all that time—it helps us ensure that important information is always available to citizens across the country.”

Cutting costs and enabling innovation

Many local government municipalities have measured significant improvements in core internal processes since deploying the case management solution from Kuntien Tiera. For example, the City of Mikkeli reported a 97.9% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions since switching from paper-based processes to the Fujitsu and OpenText solution. Other benefits include cost savings from reducing the need to print and handle paper and enhanced efficiency in decision-making processes.

Heinälä comments: “Our aim is not just to save time and paper and cut emissions, although those are certainly big advantages of digital case management. Thanks to our work with Fujitsu Finland and OpenText, we’re enabling greater transparency in the decision-making processes in local governments, which is an important benefit for the whole of Finnish society.”

Looking to the future, Kuntien Tiera plans to build on its success with the OpenText and Fujitsu solution to bring the benefits of digital case management to more stakeholders across the country, including new types of users such as hospital districts.

“We are trusted custodians of our customers’ sensitive information, and thanks to the OpenText Documentum platform, we can ensure that our data is protected 24/7/365,” concludes Heinälä. “We look forward to building on what we have achieved with OpenText and Fujitsu Finland and finding innovative ways to help our customers improve public services for people across the country.”