 Okay. Welcome everybody. Nice to see so many people here. First of all, I would like to remind everybody that there is triple contribution going on throughout the conference and tomorrow there's contributions a day and for one at least the system we're going to talk today about would not be possible without everybody contributing. So it's very important I hope as many as possible will attend and there's lots of things to do for all kinds of skills so everybody's needed. All right. My name is Jarin Aujainen. I'm from Sealy Solutions based in Finland. I'm a Drupal Combatants Lead at Sealy Solutions and at this project I've worked as a Drupal Architect. Yes, hi everyone. Glad to be here with you today. So my name is Evelina Viksram. I work at Neste. I'm going to tell you a bit more about the company in a short while. I work as a sustainability specialist focusing on our renewable products and I'm here today presenting this project because I've been acting as a product owner for this product for two and a half years now. So today we're here with Jarin with the presentation Building a Platform for Sustainability. So this is what we have been working on together with Sealy Solutions for one and a half years now. So I'm going to present a sort of like a real case study on our journey and the things that we have experienced. I would say that our presentation has four different sections. So first I'm going to tell you a bit about like what is the product actually. So what is the platform really about. Secondly I'm going to tell a bit more about the needs that we have for the product and why did we end up building such a product. Then we're going to tell or actually Jarin is going to tell a bit more about the actual development of the product and how has that sort of like been and how has it evolved over time. And lastly of course because we already have around 20 months of time building the product together. So we're going to share some lessons that we have learned during the project. So so those four sections will be covered. And also we're aiming to leave some time for questions at the end of the session. So then you're free to ask whatever you have on your mind. So yeah we hope you enjoy the session and please do ask in the end if you have anything. So yeah first about Nesta just giving you some background so that you can understand maybe a bit better the solution and what we are what we're doing. So Nesta is actually a company that was established in Finland approximately 70 years ago and the primary purpose of the company was to secure the fossil crude oil supplied Finland. So basically making sure that there's enough crude oil in Finland. But the company has evolved quite a lot over time. And now recently during the recent say 15 years renewable products segment has become continuously more and more important for us. So we have been building solutions for our customers that help them to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Primarily our products is renewable diesel for road transport. But we are also continuously developing more solutions. For instance renewable jet fuel for planes as well as renewable polymers and chemicals to be used in different industries. And also throughout the whole journey sustainability has been very important for us. So we have actually been selected as the third most sustainable company in the world by corporate Knights. So it's the global 100 listing. And it's also very important to notice the change that and the transformation that has happened in the company. So basically a larger share of our profit already comes from the renewable products when compared to the traditional fossil based products. And currently we are very strongly driven by our vision about creating a healthier planet for our children. So really focusing on the renewable segment. Then about the actual products. I prepared a couple of slides. I was thinking how to sort of like present the essential about the product that we are building. So I'll give you a try. So suppliers sustainability protocol in a nutshell. And you think about it. What is our target as a company. We are targeting becoming a global leader in renewable and circular solutions. And what that means like what kind of drivers are there when we want to aim for this target. So first of all of course we know that we need more raw materials if we want to create more products different kind of products but also more products in sort of a quantity wise. So we need to supply more. We also need to manage smaller more scattered streams of materials. And this goes down to the type of raw materials that we're using that I'm going to be explaining a bit more shortly. And then of course because we want to source more we need to sort of like present ourselves as a sort of like a preferred partner also for our suppliers. So really think about our supplier more as a customer which is maybe a bit against the traditional way of thinking when we are actually the customer. Then talking about the sort of like external external customer of ours there's a very diverse pool of different raw material suppliers. I'll be going back to the characteristics a bit later. But maybe what is important to understand in this context that we have basically two categories of supplier raw material suppliers. So one category is providing this sort of like waste and residue based materials which could be any sort of processing residues waste oils from different industries even like for instance used cooking oil collected from individual restaurants or maybe fish waste fish fat from fish processing facility or all kinds of different materials from industries. And then the other basket would be the sort of a cultivated or crop based materials which are sort of like traditionally cultivated and grown for the purpose of being used used for the end product. So these could be for instance red seed oil or soybean oil or palm oil some examples. And currently the split is around like 80% is waste and residue based and 20% is cultivated and sourcing continuously more waste and residue based materials sort of like adds complexity to the buying of the material. Then when we look at the internal customer we have four different teams working on together with the suppliers in ensuring sustainability of the supply. So we have supply team sustainability which I am representing we have compliance team and of course operations team. Then we have two processes so we have a supplier onboarding process for all our suppliers to become sort of like after partners of ours. We have very strict sustainability requirements because when we think about the end customer of say renewable diesel they are buying the product because they want to want to sort of like substitute a fossil product with it. So they want to be sure that it's sustainable it comes from sustainable regions. And then of course also monitoring individual physical deliveries batches to be delivered to Neste because we want to make sure that all material that we receive is sustainable. And then lastly if we think about the benefits that we are seeking after when we want to build a platform for our suppliers for managing these two processes with these stakeholders. So we of course want to harmonize processes bring in more efficiency that supports growth. We want to enhance our collaboration and transparency both internally and with the external customer. We also want to develop our sustainability position further so we want to make sure that our suppliers and materials are sustainable but also develop it further help them in that journey. And then we want to store data in a meaningful manner and utilize it in a meaningful manner. Then maybe something still about the journey that we have taken for this. So actually when we started was it was May into 2017. I had recently joined the company and we actually held the first sort of like open innovation session. So this we called it a sustainability hackathon which was 24 hours you know innovating with with external teams that were selected for the hackathon in order to get ideas on how could we digitalize our supply chain sustainability and what kind of solutions could be used for that. That actually resulted in contracting one of the teams to make a proof of concept version for us which was late 2017 where we actually sort of like selected some key functionalities that we wanted to demo and we were then using this for showing it both internally but also for our external stakeholders quite widely to understand better what should we aim for. Then we actually decided that yes we need to go for an own platform telling a bit more also about this later on but basically wanted to ensure that there's a strong link to our operational business of course data ownership of it flexibility and control over the platform. Then we actually chose agile development as a development mode. This was also something quite new for our company and we will be sharing some lessons learned about that as well with Jarin. We launched a beta version of the product end of last year which was this minimum viable product that we use as a sort of like a product that we can test with our first with the first selected suppliers and internal users to understand better and get feedback that is based on actual use of the product. And then this year target is to launch an improved version which is like non-beta version anymore and in the future we see many interesting aspects child test like looking into prospects, new markets, new type of formative real estate analytics more focused on different sustainability aspects just to give you some examples. Okay and well while Nesta was doing the planning in the in the early phases of the project there was a lot of good work being done there was user interface mockups done they had mapped their processes so that there were process charts they had done a huge amount of user interviews for kind of to base the design on and that was the that was the material that was given to us for the proposal and then there was quite a lot of information there and then we went through it and looked at it and we realized that user interfaces are not enough we need to design for the user experience too we need to validate it we need to test it with users and because Nesta is a global company they have business in different regions all over the world and there are different processes in different areas and the previous workflow was done quite heavily human-based so that it was essentially a paper process that can be very flexible and as such it can accommodate different kind of processes in different areas and for a single platform we couldn't do that and we didn't want to do that because we wanted to be efficient so there has to have to be a lot of work to be done to unify the business process all over all over the different regions and as we discovered a lot of new work to be done new needs new requirements we had to discuss with with the Nesta team what's actually the most important and when we find new stuff new functionalities to implement our new features and other new requirements we need to figure out which is the most important to get first out and what needs to be worked on first and now Eva talks about more how yes so um decided to name this section as landscape complexity and needs because there were various needs from the end users and things um tend to get quite complicated at some points because of the reasons that I also mentioned so I'm trying to have a bit more look into like what made it well it's it's it sounds a bit like negative saying what made it so difficult but maybe that's still what we want to sort of like answer to so basically what challenges the development of such platforms so listing some key reasons for that first of all there's a really big variety in the target group especially in the external target group because Nesta has a capability to utilize approximately 15 different raw materials for the production of renewable products and these raw materials come with very different characteristics so cultivated versus waste and residue is one dimension but there are also many other dimensions that we need to take into account secondly the sort of capabilities of the end users are very different so the companies are very different so we might talk about a very big global multinational company or then we might talk about a very small waste used cooking oil collector that has three employees so there's so much variety in in terms of size but also geographies we source globally very globally and then of course also level of technical skills so might be that especially in big companies that people are more advanced advanced with technologies but in the small companies they might need a lot of support for that then also as Jarry also mentioned uh because our previous system was pretty much pen, paper and email um we noticed that the process has had localized over time and it took quite an effort to sort of like understand what's going on and how to harmonize because not everyone is doing the things the same way and then you need to have the discussion what is the right way of doing things then of course um efficient we need we needed to think a lot about efficiency and how to sort of like make things efficient but without maybe harmonizing too much because then sometimes you also need to think about localization but of course we know that the demand for renewable solutions is on rise so remaining competitive is very critical for the business then also it's good to bear in mind that we are operating in a market that is emerging so customers uh have different preferences on sustainability what makes the product sustainable and those might change rapidly also those might depend on the end market as well and then of course also um regulatory authorities have different definitions on what is sustainable and those might also change so new legislation might be implemented so sometimes we need to react fast uh on on the sort of like product and the requirements that we have and lastly of course also growth has an impact on uh what we're doing so building something and growing uh fast at the same time requires some extra efforts for balancing things one example of this could be for instance that now we are sort of like working further to build the 1.0 version of the platform but at the same time we need to support the growth of the business by implementing for instance neural materials that we want to start buying so it's a constant balancing to support the growth but continue developing what you're already doing and then maybe um this is one of the questions that i get quite often during the journey so good to maybe open up a bit so why didn't you just buy a ready-made solution this is something we were thinking about and there are some reasons why we did not do that so maybe one of the most evident ones was that we really wanted to have a system that connects to our core business we always say at nested that sustainability is at the core of our business with the renewable products and how we operate with them so we wanted to make sure that we don't just buy a standalone solution that is then forgotten somewhere and maybe someone looks at it once in a month and that's it but we wanted to make sure it's it's connected so that's why um we have for instance the management of physical deliveries um and we're building integrations to our ERP system so those are some examples and then of course uh I already mentioned on the previous slide the changing uh market environment so that's why the flexibility of the end product is very important for us and agile development has supported this highly then of course once you collect data um you can do all kinds of things but it's so really like once you have data in in a sort of a solid manner in in in a structure that makes sense you can really improve your business you can improve your understanding you can optimize what you're doing and then something that I already mentioned so as we want to grow and there's a limited amount of waste and residue-based raw materials in the in the world of course um so then we feel that there's a need for the suppliers to position us as the preferred partner so we want them to feel that they want to work with us and that was very important for us so we wanted to think like how could we provide advantages to the supplier actually yeah and I think that Jare will continue from here yes all right so based on these these needs we started to create the solution and just just how Evelyn just said that a ready-made solution was seen as not the not the optimal one for the for the product so we rather quickly saw that Drupal is a very good match for this mainly because of because of its capabilities and integrations and customizability so it can do whatever an STF needs currently and it very likely can do all the things that they will need in the future but a bit more about the journey of actual the actual creation so we very early saw that this will be and is a project that is kind of the it has all the all the essences of an of an agile project I put this connefin diagram here to remind everybody that that agile is the way to solve the solve the complex issues where where we know where we want to get but we are not quite sure or we cannot plan ahead how how we get there and and that is what the SSP product is essentially it's a system that has a lot of complexity it has a lot of needs that are need are found as we go and but it's still very well doable it's not it doesn't go into the chaotic realm it's it has some business behind it and it makes sense so we introduced the client to agile ways of working they they had very little experience in agile previously so we basically started the project with coaching the team coaching our team and the nested team everybody together so that they can get to get working from the very beginning together and and there was strong will at nested to start working in agile manner but there was very little experience and there was a very strong tradition of working in waterfall ways of planning for us then implementing and then seeing what happened but there was a desire to change so we just needed to make that work for us and I can say now that it has been actually very successful it's been it's been enjoyable to work there and we've had good feedback on the agile ways and also we needed to balance our agile ways of working with other projects going on in the company for example the ERP project which is a huge project of course you know for a company that size and it's definitely nothing to do with agile and we need to balance with that and okay then a few words about how we made the team understand what we are actually supposed to achieve because the business is not something that everybody understands it has a lot of strange terminology we were hit with acronyms of different sorts for all the all the different feedstocks there's an acronym and and the nested people fluently talk about pfad and uco and and all the things and and then at some point somebody's always saying that well what does this mean so to make the team able to actually achieve what they're needed needed to achieve we need to not just tell them what they need to do and of course because they're skilled people developers they know how to do it but it was essential that they know why they're doing it and if somebody hasn't seen Simon Simon Sinek talk about talk about the importance of why it's the circle circle diagram is this popular is popularized by him so you should take a look that it's a five minute talk go and see it but how we did it we identified the need that the the team development team needs know why we're doing this so I asked our product owner to actually just tell and and it's not important what it says on the on the picture but important is what what the picture achieves the the picture picture tells the whole was able to tell the whole team that what is the process for internal customers for the external customers what what kind of different needs how the how the past diverge at different points it looks complicated well because the process is complicated and it was kind of down to earth approach that we just you it's it's a efficient tool for communication just draw a picture and that's what we did and it was it was great success though the whole team could understand after this after looking at this picture and getting the explanation related to it they could all right away understand that okay this is why we're doing it and now we know what we're going to do and how we're going to do it of course more would more complexity always comes after it okay so the complexity factors it was already mentioned that business is being done differently in different regions the feedstocks are different all kinds of conventions are different in different areas but we don't want to make a solution that that's customized for customized for all all the different use cases so it needs to be some kind of one size solution that will well enough with fit everybody and and at some some point this was kind of a essential problem in in consolidating the architecture the information architecture and user experience so that we can actually have a one architectural model one content model where we can have the data in a usable and meaningful way but still we can make the user user interface such that it helps all the different users in different different situations and we have learned quite well well in this project that as it said it said in in agile planning is important but plans are discardable and they will be discarded many times over the project so one example about how how the plans were discarded supply chains are one one important thing to model in the in the system because that's what i use to to report the sustainability of that of the supply chain of the suppliers and and also to report the deliveries that where where they came from and how much carbon emissions were involved in the transportation for example and the production of the of the materials so we have the facilities there and transportation is in between okay that was kind of simple but then we realized that well the transportation is not something that we can model because we have not enough data for that we don't know how the how it actually goes between those different locations so okay well this looks kind of simple but then the supply chain can it can branch and it actually can branch in different points and then eventually there can be very many entities on different levels especially in the beginning of the beginning of the chain and it gets very complex and for this actually the information architecture is not complicated but the user interface is very complicated how can we actually make a user interface to input let's say tens or maybe hundreds of entities in a chain that the user will be able to manage manage them and that's actually to be honest that's still something we are not quite finished yet with but it's it's a work in progress still okay maybe some of you have seen this picture and you know what's coming next so we made a nice user interface at first it's clean simple efficient and then the users come in and this happens and this is exactly why we need to test there are reasons for the users to behave in different ways that we we are not aware of when we make the first implementation so we get new design challenges as we go further and that's that's sorry and we had some ideas from the beginning and they became invalid at some point we needed a refactor we needed to redesign and we needed to accept that at some point that we have done work and we have implemented features and functionalities and they work but they don't actually do everything that is needed so we need to iterate and go we need to step a few steps back to get actually forward and an important part of that was to challenge the previous plans so that we can actually see before we do the final implementations for something that well we planned this three months ago like this but maybe we shouldn't do it like this maybe we need to think over it a bit more and we need to do that we also needed to push the business stakeholders to to think deeper into their into their area not just to give the first answer that based on their own knowledge or their own expertise but also ask with their colleagues to get all the different information so that if if somebody who knows the European business and the Asian business answers the question and then we implement something and then the American specialist comes in and says that well we can't use this because it doesn't answer the needs because the process is so different so everybody needs to be heard and we need to make sure that the business requirements are brought in from all the different areas and most important we need to know what are the cats like which cat wants to eat from which ball so we need to understand the users so essentially many people who have come come into the project since the start have told me that hey well you're not using Drupal that much here but actually we're very we are actually very deep in Drupal we are using custom entities which is an awesome feature for us we have I think two nodes on the whole system currently but custom entities we have plenty because there's different needs we need and the custom entities work very well with workflows which is in Drupal core that's excellent we've used messages module for creating notifications and and kind of notifying and enabling communication between users for different events queuing events something happening when something else happens and it needs to happen in a batch because we don't want to them happen in line and everything goes kind of asynchronously and then we've recently started using heavily the rest api and developing react components on top of that and then of course one very nice feature that we have gotten from Drupal and it's definitely an advantage it's a security features the security practice in Drupal access management that that kind of things and then managing users user roles are in an important important role so essentially we are using Drupal as the back as the core of our back end and we're extending it and it's something that I was thinking of yesterday when Chris was talking about about Drupal expanding the horizons and going into integrations and expanding things this is actually just what we've been doing here so next what have we learned ever you will start with that yes um so some lessons learned trying to be pretty pretty here looking at the time um so maybe um something that we noticed is that actually experience from working with agile methods is not as important as commitment from the organization to do so so as Jari mentioned we are pretty much a wonderful um house so we've been doing some agile development on our retail side but not really on the on the production and product side at all so this project was actually a pioneer at Neste in in working in an agile manner so um this has been of course been really encouraging because we have been uh we have received a lot of support for instance from the from the management and it has been really clear that this is they want this project to be agile so there's this kind of support but then maybe what is the challenge is that although you are agile in your own bubble but if the organization around here is is acting as waterfall and the expectations are as in waterfall projects uh there are clashes for sure so something that we have noticed for instance that there is still a strong appetite in the company for upfront planning um deadline so we want to know what is coming what is your half half year plan for next half year uh when are you going to deliver this when are you going to deliver that what is your deadline so there's a strong strong will to have that and that's sort of like conflicts with agile way of working so we sort of need to balance constantly with the expectations that we have secondly um something we noticed that the stakeholders don't always know first what they want so um we noticed quite quickly that because our previous system was pen and paper and email um the stakeholders can't really describe what they want from a system how do they want to do things in a system it's very difficult for them so we have to move into prototyping and creating mock-ups quite quickly and showing them to the end user because when they were able to use those they sort of like elaborate their comments much more efficiently and we we have been doing a lot of validation and also what is important what Jare pointed out that we do do it in different regions so our key regions where we operate to understand the differences between the different regions so I think this has been very important for us but maybe one finding also is that our when I was talking that our organization is not used to this way of working it can also be seen with the prototypes so for instance our internal stakeholders don't even know how to use prototypes how are they going to click through a prototype so we need to even teach them to do that so really starting from the scratch and this is just an example on like how can we gradually improve so this is the landing page from our system for suppliers and you can see that it has evolved over time and the only way to allow this kind of uh involvement is to be brave enough to show work in progress to your end customer so not waiting for two years to make it perfect because you simply can't make it perfect without showing it to your end customer and getting the feedback from them what do they appreciate what they don't like so here are some like concrete sort of like concrete things that we have done for the landing page that all are based on feedback from the users and then maybe just the last point from me is that sort of like Neste is traditionally a company that is sort of like industry heavily industrial background focused on the production of products so that's really sort of our area our competence area so everything comes down pretty easily to efficiency how can we be efficient how can we streamline our purchases how can we produce more and with less resource and these kind of things so we have really had to challenge how the way we think and really start to think about the customer the human there and start to think about the supplier as our customer and not vice versa so really sort of like challenging the way we think being more human centric so that's sort of like the middle middle section here and that's sort of like something that we need to do if we want to at some point think more like more from a value-based perspective thinking about having this sort of like platform and ecosystem type of thinking so this is the journey that we are at yes handing back together yes very important success factor was to to have everybody involved and everybody feeling that they are a member of the team so we don't have a we don't have a development team and and and the client team separately we don't have a client vendor vendor distinction basically there from the very beginning everybody has been part of the same team during their different driving their different roles bringing in their own expertise so effectively what effectively what we get from including everybody as as kind of equal member of the team they have everybody has different kind of understanding and knowledge expertise they bring that in and we can we can utilize that so so we don't actually have to stop working and wait to reach for somebody who knows one detail because they are already there they are part of the team and we we know them and we we are familiar with working with everybody one thing though is that the team has grown quite large in the process and what easily happens in the large team is that you have somebody somebody who's is responsible for back end and others who are responsible for front end and then maybe somebody drives one functionality and others some other functionalities and it's been very important to remind us all the time that we don't want to to silo the development so that even if somebody knows knows one feature better than others they shouldn't be kind of they shouldn't own it completely so that so that the work kind of scatters around people but the team should keep united and that's that's really something that we have had to remind of us remind ourselves every two weeks and our retros basically always somebody points out that hey let's not silo the work and let's still not silo the work and so far it's it's kind of fine and of course important part of making a teamwork is to co-logate the team so that when when the team members are there they might be might be sitting next to each other or on the other side of the room they can ask questions they they can they can get the answers they need very quickly and also it's important to have a kind of sense of community and have fun with the people have have lunches together and that that all works towards making making the distinction between client and vendor disappear so that everybody's just on the team and every one's member of the team and that's i think that's maybe one of the most important points on this and then lastly but not least i want to emphasize that design is facilitation design is something that is not only done by designers it's done by everybody it's it's we can think of user interface design we can think of concept design user experience design technical design but still it's a cooperation and and what it needs to do is to get the relevant information about what and why we need to do out of the people who who actually know the business for which needs for so that we can actually fulfill the needs of the business and it is essentially a process discovery we we find new things and and we need to dig deeper get more information and that needs to be done together so any questions we have a few minutes left please use the microphone thank you mentioned the complete team with including some people from the organization can you give a rough what kind of people were in the team developer's front and back yes um we had um we had the from from anesthetized we had the product owner and the three specialists four four specialists and an approach manager from your side too and then from from our side there was a there was a project manager as a kind of a business contact then we have myself as the as the tech lead or architect and then we have a scrum master front and developers uh UX developers uh UX designers and Drupal developers uh integration specialists and it will help still some other people and then we have test automation separate and content specialists nowadays also and also testing manager for the user acceptance testing and probably still somebody who we forget it's it's it's close to 20 over 20 people nowadays I think involved in the project and you said you called and located them so was it a team that was actually together all all the time for two weeks or just regular basis two days a week or something yes we we have um we have an office space provided by nesta and we work there I'd say two or three three days a week and in one one space and most people are either and we have kind of tried to make so that there's at least one day when everybody's there okay that's possible interesting presentation thanks I was wondering if you could expand a bit more on on the working with the Drupal APIs and react front and since I saw it on a lot of slides well it's a it's a large area we can talk further later but I'll just give a quick overview so um basically we have we had two options we could use JSON API or then do custom rest rest resource plugins and we ended up with custom rest resource plugins because we had quite strict security concerns and jason api was not out of the box able to fulfill all the exact needs that we had and and we decided that oh well if we need to customize then we're just going to go with full custom solution for the rest endpoints and then uh if you happen to see Fabian France's presentation yesterday about decoupling the back end we've actually been doing something similar to that so that we're actually pushing the dates for the front end from from the back end before going through through the render pipelines and and using Drupal settings for relaying information for for the react applications any other questions what is the size of the project in terms of custom code if we count all the php react code uh sass code and maybe even even configuration yambles we probably get something like 100 000 lines today and it's growing rapidly anything more okay thank you thank you