Self-sufficiency in electricity production is a dream for many homeowners and businesses. With this in mind, in the past years GreenEnergy Finland has invested heavily in developing intelligent solutions. The goal is to find the best solution for the customer’s needs. The crown jewel of the development is GEF Vision, a new smart mobile application or lobby display that works as a monitoring system with which the customer can keep track of their own solar power production and manage its consumption. The use of this intelligent electrical network supports the production of clean, domestic energy without transfer costs and it reduces dependency on imported electricity.

Sanna Vainikainen, a project controller managing the ERP, rightly feels proud of the new smart application. “We are especially pleased that the GEF Vision has been granted the Finnish Key Flag Symbol. We are happy to emphasise the Finnish origin of the software developed to create an intelligent electricity network,” says Vainikainen.

NetSuite and Staria ONE STOP in the centre of startup activities

GreenEnergy Finland has been a Staria ONE STOP client for some years. Previously separate systems were combined under one cloud-based NetSuite system. Accounting and payroll services were centralised to be managed by one partner, a contact person and a team. Staria was chosen as the partner, because Staria was able to offer the required aptly services with the scalable cloud-based NetSuite and with quick and experienced implementation.

Sanna Vainikainen praises the decision, “I think centralising information systems is a good solution overall and for us it has worked very well. It has helped with processes, because overlapping work stages have been eliminated. These services have brought us immense benefits, because the financial management has well-defined processes and all information can be found in one place.”

“NetSuite has strongly directed the development of our processes and given us the means to plan how things could be done better. Because NetSuite has multiple different options for what and how things can be done, we continuously get new ideas to develop our activities,” Vainikainen continues.

Competitive advantage from data use and scalability

Vainikainen speaks strongly about the importance of systematically recording and using data. “With modern systems there is an impossible amount of data collected and in the future the significance of processing this data will only grow as competition increases. Many startups do not understand how important it is to collect data: based on data, one can for instance develop value-added services that strengthen the brand or support targeted advertising. Even we used to have our data scattered in hard drives, e-mails and all over the place, but now gathering it all together in the NetSuite system makes it possible for almost any worker at GreenEnergy to find the information they need.”

GreenEnergy Finland continues to grow rapidly. According to Vainikainen, this sets expectations for ERP and its scalability, “As is common in growing fields, one challenge is keeping up the quality of the services while scaling the operations to new dimensions. We at GEF believe that a system like NetSuite brings us great advantages compared to our competitors. Through it we can develop our processes flexibly to respond to requirements from the markets and customers.”

“So far, there has been nothing that could not have been exported to NetSuite,” Vainikainen says with a smile.