Due to the collaboration between Hansel and Innofactor, Finland became one of the first three EU Member States to successfully complete the eForms reform streamlining the notification of public procurement
Hansel is a joint public procurement unit that provides its customers with joint procurement services as well as services for the development of tendering and procurement. Hansel maintains the Hilma service, which is an online channel for notices on public procurement and a tendering platform. Companies get real-time information on upcoming and ongoing public sector tenders and the results of tenders from Hilma.
Hilma is owned and steered by the Ministry of Finance. Innofactor has served as Hansel's technical partner and helped to develop the system since December 2018.
In 2019, the European Commission launched the eForms public procurement notice reform. The objective of the reform is to accelerate the digitalization of public procurement in all EU Member States and bring consistency and clarity to procurement notices. In addition to the standardization of forms, the reform aims to improve the quality of data in public procurement notices and increase the transparency of public procurement, among other objectives.
The starting points for the implementation of eForms in Finland were good compared to many other EU countries, as Hilma was already a centralized channel for procurement notices that also sends the EU notices from other tendering systems for publication in the TED service. Hilma is implemented in Microsoft Azure using the PaaS model.
The renewal of Hilma required careful planning, as the project had to take into account the interface users who send procurement notices to Hilma, for example.
The technical implementation of the project began in summer 2022 and the project was carried out using agile Scrum methods. The stages of the eForms reform were broken down into smaller projects that were logically organized using storyboards and other facilitation approaches.
The work was organized in such a way that the team consisting of Innofactor's and Hansel's experts had sufficient subject-matter expertise as well as technical competence. Dialogue between experts representing different fields was essential for the success of the project.
The team was cohesive and committed to its goals. Test automation developed during the project was used in the testing of procurement notices. The development work was carried out on a two-week sprint cycle. This made it easy to compare the progress of the project with the workload estimates provided, which, according to Hansel, turned out to be very accurate.
The agile method made it possible to react quickly to changes and, where necessary, bring in additional resources in a timely manner. Chief Digital Officer Mikko Saavalainen from Hansel is pleased with the cooperation and the progress of the project.
"The workload estimates were incredibly accurate throughout the project. From the perspective of agile development, this project was carried out as well as one can imagine."
The Hilma steering group had decided that eForms notices would be deployed in Finland at the beginning of September 2023. The project was completed on schedule, and Finland became a leader in the implementation of eForms by being one of the first three EU Member States to successfully complete the reform.
"From the perspective of agile development, this project was carried out as well as one can imagine."
Mikko Saavalainen
Chief Digital Officer
Hansel Oy
The following solutions and technologies, among others, are a part of of the overall solution delivered to Hansel:
