Lin­nan­mä­ki enhances knowl­edge man­age­ment and cus­tomer experience

Chil­dren’s Day Foun­da­tion, the non-prof­it organ­i­sa­tion behind Lin­nan­mä­ki Amuse­ment Park, has tak­en sig­nif­i­cant steps for­ward in knowl­edge-based man­age­ment in coop­er­a­tion with Islet. In the mul­ti-phase project, the Foun­da­tion’s report­ing and ana­lyt­ics solu­tion was replaced with a mod­ern cloud-based data plat­form and com­pre­hen­sive Pow­er BI report­ing, as well as ana­lyt­ics capa­bil­i­ties. The new solu­tion will help Lin­nan­mä­ki opti­mise the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, man­age resources bet­ter and sup­port the foun­da­tion’s impor­tant work.

Start­ing point – lim­it­ed use of information

The goal of the Chil­dren’s Day Foun­da­tion is to enable mem­o­rable enter­tain­ment expe­ri­ences and at the same time raise funds for child wel­fare work. How­ev­er, the oper­a­tional man­age­ment of Lin­nan­mä­ki Amuse­ment Park was large­ly based on an out­dat­ed report­ing sys­tem that relied on the infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture main­tained by an exter­nal sup­pli­er. The pre­vi­ous solu­tion was tech­ni­cal­ly out­dat­ed, lim­it­ed and dif­fi­cult to expand. In prac­tice, day-to-day knowl­edge-based man­age­ment relied on Excel reports, and a sig­nif­i­cant part of the report­ing work was man­u­al, which lim­it­ed the abil­i­ty to make agile decisions.

The chal­lenges of the report­ing solu­tion includ­ed down­time, a lim­it­ed num­ber of data sources, and the lim­it­ed pos­si­bil­i­ty to pro­duce more in-depth ana­lyt­ics. Lin­nan­mäk­i’s sys­tems could only pro­vide indi­vid­ual finan­cial and oper­a­tional indi­ca­tors, and if the data need­ed to be com­bined more exten­sive­ly with bud­get or oth­er infor­ma­tion, an exter­nal ser­vice provider had to be con­tact­ed. There­fore, the foun­da­tion of knowl­edge-based man­age­ment need­ed a thor­ough over­haul so that the organ­i­sa­tion could mon­i­tor and opti­mise its oper­a­tions and sup­port its core mis­sion for child wel­fare work.

The solu­tion – phased mod­ern­iza­tion and scal­able data plat­form with Lake­house architecture

Islet and the Chil­dren’s Day Foun­da­tion start­ed their coop­er­a­tion with a data roadmap project, the pur­pose of which was to define the future tar­get state of knowl­edge man­age­ment in Lin­nan­mä­ki and to cre­ate an enter­prise archi­tec­ture that would sup­port the organ­i­sa­tion’s long-term goals. Dur­ing this con­sul­ta­tion work, key data source sys­tems, data enrich­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties, and tech­nolo­gies such as the Microsoft Azure-based data plat­form and Pow­er BI tool for ana­lyt­ics and visu­al­iza­tion were identified.

The first con­crete devel­op­ment step was the imple­men­ta­tion of Pow­er BI’s Proof of Con­cept (POC) on top of Lin­nan­mäk­i’s exist­ing data archi­tec­ture. This POC project helped Lin­nan­mä­ki under­stand the poten­tial of Pow­er BI as a mod­ern ana­lyt­ics tool and received pos­i­tive feed­back from the orga­ni­za­tion, which strength­ened the deci­sion to expand the solution.

In the next phase, Islet imple­ment­ed a new data plat­form with Lake­house archi­tec­ture (Medal­lion archi­tec­ture) for the Microsoft Azure cloud ser­vice. The core of the solu­tion is Azure Synapse Ana­lyt­ics, which enables effi­cient data man­age­ment and import from mul­ti­ple source sys­tems, such as the foun­da­tion’s ERP sys­tem, HR sys­tems and POS sys­tem. The solu­tion uti­lizes Azure’s Data Lake, where data is gath­ered from dif­fer­ent sys­tems and cre­ates a basis for analy­sis and report­ing. Weath­er data from the inter­face of the Finnish Mete­o­ro­log­i­cal Insti­tute (FMI) has also been import­ed into the solu­tion. This makes it pos­si­ble to assess the impact of weath­er con­di­tions on cus­tomer flows, prof­itabil­i­ty and oper­a­tional actions.

Islet expand­ed the sys­tem to include new data sources and report­ing enti­ties. Reports built on top of Pow­er BI now serve a wide range of func­tions – from finan­cial admin­is­tra­tion and per­son­nel plan­ning to the oper­a­tional man­age­ment of the amuse­ment park. The report­ing takes into account, among oth­er things, finan­cial infor­ma­tion, per­son­nel costs, equip­ment usage data and main­te­nance mea­sures, as well as data from tick­et­ing and POS systems.

Ben­e­fits – up-to-date infor­ma­tion enables agile deci­sion-mak­ing and opti­mi­sa­tion of cus­tomer experience

With the help of the new archi­tec­ture, Lin­nan­mä­ki has tak­en sig­nif­i­cant leaps in knowl­edge-based man­age­ment. The cloud-based data plat­form and Pow­er BI report­ing solu­tion have brought sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits, such as data trans­paren­cy and open­ness for the entire orga­ni­za­tion. Up-to-date infor­ma­tion enables more accu­rate oper­a­tional plan­ning, espe­cial­ly dur­ing high sea­sons when cus­tomer num­bers vary great­ly. Today, every per­ma­nent employ­ee has access to Pow­er BI reports and can track met­rics relat­ed to the busi­ness intel­li­gence that mat­ters to them.

One of the most con­crete exam­ples of data uti­liza­tion is com­bin­ing weath­er data with cus­tomer and oper­a­tional data. The impact of weath­er on the amuse­ment park’s cus­tomer flows is sig­nif­i­cant, and fore­casts enable resource opti­mi­sa­tion even before cus­tomer flows arrive.

Sep­a­rate report­ing enti­ties have been imple­ment­ed for Lin­nan­mäk­i’s dif­fer­ent func­tions: week­ly report­ing for finan­cial mon­i­tor­ing, report­ing on the use and main­te­nance of amuse­ment park equip­ment for equip­ment ser­vices, report­ing tools tar­get­ed at cor­po­rate sales, sales analy­sis for restau­rant oper­a­tions, and more detailed data analy­ses for game sales. In addi­tion, a com­pre­hen­sive dash­board has been built for man­ag­ing the amuse­ment park, which is used to mon­i­tor the core indicators.

The devel­op­ment jour­ney continues

It has been a spe­cial hon­our for Islet to work with an organ­i­sa­tion such as the Chil­dren’s Day Foun­da­tion, which does impor­tant work for child wel­fare services.

Lin­nan­mä­ki still has a devel­op­ment jour­ney ahead of it, as the organ­i­sa­tion wants to con­tin­ue to improve its knowl­edge-based man­age­ment capa­bil­i­ties. The aim is also to strength­en inter­nal exper­tise so that the util­i­sa­tion of data can be fur­ther expand­ed with­in the organisation.

- — - — -

The Chil­dren’s Day Foun­da­tion is a Finnish foun­da­tion that main­tains and devel­ops Lin­nan­mä­ki Amuse­ment Park in Helsin­ki. The foun­da­tion’s mis­sion is to raise funds for Finnish child wel­fare work for six child wel­fare organ­i­sa­tions. Year after year, Lin­nan­mä­ki Amuse­ment Park offers joy and expe­ri­ences from one gen­er­a­tion of fun to anoth­er, and at the same time, the prof­its from the amuse­ment park’s oper­a­tions sup­port child wel­fare work.

#Lin­nan­mä­ki #Las­ten­Päivän­Säätiö #knowl­edge­m­an­age­ment #cus­tomer­ex­pe­ri­ence #data #ana­lyt­ics #Power­BI #dat­a­plat­form #report­ing #Data­Lake­house #Microsof­t­Azure