OREANDA-NEWS. August 24, 2011. Fujitsu Finland manages Raisio's application services Raisio Oyj and Fujitsu Services Oy have renewed their IT agreement whereby Fujitsu continues to manage Raisio's applications. During the Sohva service launched in 2006, Raisio has cut more than half of its applications, and a nice amount of costs too.

Fujitsu's Sohva is an advanced applications development and management model. The most important operational application for Raisio is SAP, which was deployed in 2004. Besides ERP it incorporates financial accounting, procurement, inventory management, sales and distribution as well as sales forecasting and fixed assets accounting. All Raisio units in Finland use this solution. In 2006 Fujitsu's Sohva service assumed the management of SAP and other Raisio applications.

"Sohva has worked well and we have managed to cut the number of applications by more than half. Back in 2006, during the transition project we still had more than one hundred applications, and now the number is around 40. We have done this by discarding redundant applications and replacing them with newer ones and integrating them in the SAP environment. Also the divestment of the margarine business reduced the number of applications,” CFO Jyrki Paappa of Raisio says.

 According to Jyrki Paappa, rationalising applications with the Sohva model has been a smooth process.

"I have to admit that we were a bit excited going into the transition project, despite careful preparation. But the project have actually went surprisingly smoothly, without any disruptions and with both parties fully committed and doing everything they can,” he says.

The adoption of the Sohva service has reduced the application maintenance costs at Raisio.

”If we compare the current situation with where we were in 2005, today IT costs are at a clearly lower level. But what is even more important to us in our Sohva service is Fujitsu's effective programme portfolio management and nicely scalable resource allocation. Fujitsu also handles the basic maintenance of applications in a cost-effective manner. Now our IT development initiatives are business unit driven, which means that they better support our strategic goals,” Paappa mentions.

The Sohva service for Raisio was awarded an IT services management certificate in the summer of 2008. This ISO20000 certificate is the first of its kind in Finland. Fujitsu's applications business employs more than one thousand applications specialists.