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About YIT

YIT is the largest Finnish and a significant North European construction company. YIT develops and builds apartments and living services, business premises, and entire areas. The company is also specialized in demanding infrastructure construction.

In continuing operations YIT employs on average over 7,500 professionals in 10 countries: Finland, Russia, Scandinavia, the Baltic States, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. Its revenue in 2019 was approximately EUR 3.4 billion. YIT Corporation's share is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Oy. https://www.yitgroup.com/en

“Making small pieces in many locations one needs a connector. iTWO is connector. When you have this kind of connector, the end result is a masterpiece.”  - Juha Rissanen, Development Director at YIT

The challenge

YIT used to have a huge challenge of having a very complex IT architecture where they had different individual systems, which are from different providers in different fields, not connected to each other. This led to data left in different silos across the company, which made it very difficult to even collect the basic information for a basic project reporting. YIT needed to find the “connector” – the platform that connects all the data to better utilize it. 

The solution

YIT started its iTWO journey since 2014 and incrementally started using the iTWO 4.0 from September 2017. YIT had iTWO as a cornerstone of their project management information as well as cornerstone of the project management process. Collecting, analyzing, and distributing information has become a lot easier than before. 

Currently, the company is using most of the iTWO functionalities to manage its projects operating in many countries. The connection between different functionalities and modules makes it much easier for YIT to cover its business needs and consider the local requirements and regulations.

1.   3D: By using 3D model in iTWO, YIT detects clashes and checks the quality of their 3D models. Besides that, it’s mainly used for quantity estimation.

2. Procurement, Estimate, Activity model: Since procurement is not a standalone process, it’s integrated with other processes in iTWO. YIT creates sub-contracting packages and makes contracts on the platform, which enables full analytics. With iTWO, it’s easy for YIT to follow their full actual costs on the contract level. The budget of the contract, the amount including the change orders, and actual spending are easy to generate. YIT is also actively using change order management, which provides nicely presented full analytics. Valuable information such as great prices with their sub-contractors is stored in the work item catalogue for the reference of new projects. Estimation is connected with the activity model, so that information such as procurement quantity and timetables are immediately available.

3.  Controlling: YIT is able to unify the controlling structure in all of their projects and easily compare them, both on the company level and country level, by using the cross-project controlling functionality.

4.  Enterprise controlling: Once the actual cost from YIT’s ERP systems is integrated into the iTWO platform, full analytics is generated to help efficiently manage their projects. All main reports are created by using the standard iTWO functionality.

5.   Procurement: With the procurement module, there is the possibility to combine different requisitions from different projects into one request for quotation. Once YIT has the quotations back, it’s easy to separate them back by the project. Besides, it’s easy to make small lump sum purchases into contracts. With the portal functionality, it will be much easier for the YIT team to request for information from their vendors and improve the collaboration efficiency between the two parties. With the Business Partner Management module, the information of all of the business partners YIT works with, such as vendors and sub-contractors in different countries, is stored in one database. Currently, YIT is using one procurement structure in all their projects across countries. The procurement managers can easily search by needed procurement quote and easily group all the business partners who can provide a certain kind of goods or services. Business partner evaluation: The performance of YIT’s business partners is evaluated in the platform as the business partner management module automatically classifies the business partners by YIT’s own qualification criteria.

6.   Scheduling: The quantities from YIT’s BoQ and estimate on the iTWO platform are used for project durations calculation. Site managers can easily track the changes, check the schedule and update it according the current situation. The Progress Line helps the YIT team to visualize their work progress. The schedules are connected, so that for example, if there is any delay in the main schedule, the procurement schedule gets automatically updated.

The benefits

The partnership between YIT and RIB started in 2014, and the company has been progressively rolling out more modules to meet its business needs. iTWO implementation in YIT has brought a lot of value in their business operation. The most significant impact iTWO had on the YIT Group was the ability to combine all of their processes into one interface and one solution. “In the construction business there are a lot of processes, the process estimation, procurement process, scheduling process, and with such tool as iTWO, we can combine them all together.” Said Vadim Semenov, Development Manager at YIT Group.

Some of the major management benefits iTWO brought to YIT includes 3D model-based quantity calculation accuracy, which is the foundation of budget accuracy and transparency; transparency during the procurement processes; cross-project controlling and reporting flexibility; real-time physical progress monitoring on 3D; detailed and clear project workflow; Plan vs. Actual analysis based on quantities, prices and contracts data; and integration with ERP systems. 

“It has been a major change management issue instead of only implementing software. In fact, I think that it would be a huge mistake to consider this kind of project as an IT project. And it certainly has been so much more than that for us. We have centralized our Master Data Management. We have taken a new cost classification system in use. We have changed the collaboration between different roles inside the construction process.” - Hannu Hamunen, Head of Business Solutions at YIT Group IT