THROUGH ISLET BINOCULARS: JARKKO MATTILA, CEO
Founded in 2011, Sansia is a publicly owned service company owned by its customers: 96 public entities across Finland. Sansia provides its customers with procurement and contract management services, passenger transport services and channels for electronic ordering. Customers also receive support to organize their own procurement activities. Sansia is a non-profit limited liability company.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and Sansia
I am the CEO at Sansia. I have a wife and five sons. In my free time I hunt with my 2-year-old dog, a Finnish Spitz, and play all sorts of sports, like ice-hockey.
Sansia’s vision is to provide ”Smooth everyday life, smooth purchases”. We want to be more to our customers than a procurement company. Our organization has grown strongly in the past years. Our aim is to develop the service content according to our customers and improve the role of joint procurement.
What are the keys to success?
The key to success is people. Finding talented people is ever more challenging, so it is important to ensure that those existing talents are motivated. You also need to build your services to better match the needs of your customers. For the future it is also essential to manage growth and develop entities together with customers.
What kind of challenges do you see in your industry?
The challenge is public sector is to stay up to date, in the front lines of development. Our operating environment is challenged by resistance to change, ambiguity and indecision about direction. There is a great need to do things, but they don’t always get done within the desirable schedule. There are big plans for optimizing public transport and passenger transport to gain better services. This is an interesting field and hopefully there will be a lot of development in the future, enabled by technology.
What is the role of Sansia?
Currently our situation in the operations between municipalities is fragmented. Sansia’s role in the society is to clarify the joint vision by bringing customers together, across province and municipality borders, by combining operations within municipalities. Our five-year aim is to become a significant player in passenger transport and a close partner to customers in procurement and logistics in that industry.
What is the role of technology in your operations?
Development of technology has a great effect on operations management, forecasting and real-time reporting. Earlier human expertise was essential and knowledge was scattered, help by the people. Now managing the volume of knowledge is of great importance, in order to manage entities. Through improved reporting we want to offer our customers knowledge in its right form and in real time, so they can develop their procurement should they wish to do so. We all need to adapt to the constant change of the operating environment.
What is your organization’s key message to its stakeholders and customers?
My message to customers is based on our vision: Smooth everyday life, smooth purchases. Sansia is more than a procurement company. Although our customers have different needs and starting points, procurement units work better together. It is also more profitable to do joint business procurement. As a special feature our operations are guided by a law that is difficult to apply and requires expertise.
What is the best part of your work?
The best part of my work is definitely working with talented people and developing together. My guideline in my own leadership is to focus on motivating and engaging competent people in their roles. Sansia invests in coaching and training. Continuous learning together in the midst of growth is important.
How would you describe the partnership with Islet?
The partnership with Islet is a low-threshold partnership. As a business and a customer, we are the same size and our processes fit together well. For us, Islet is a reliable long-term partner that has recently also gone through a refreshing rebranding.
Motto:
Smooth procurement
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