DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019: Building a platform for sustainability
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 01/11/2019

Eveliina Vikström, Jari Nousiainen

We have built a service for collecting and reporting the sustainability, supply chain and delivery related information of Neste’s renewable products on Drupal. The requirement was a solution for gathering large amounts of data from suppliers with different raw materials, geographical locations and ways of operation. Among the goals of the service are to harmonize processes and reduce manual workload, improve suppliers’ affiliation with Neste as a partner and most importantly of all, facilitate gathering high quality sustainability information and enable Neste’s ambitious growth targets for renewable products business.

Neste saw the need to build a custom solution, "Supplier Sustainability Portal" to ensure sustainability would be tightly integrated into the core business and to maintain control and flexibility of the system while growing in an emerging market. Taking up the challenge, a project was started to first specify the needs, then to build, and finally deploy the solution, in tight collaboration between development team and business stakeholders.

We will cover the initial discovery process of ideating the features and capabilities of the system, further design process and development, as well as reasoning why a custom service based on Drupal was seen as the best fit for the needs. Also we will include important lessons learned in the process, both from the business stakeholder side learning to work with software development and development side learning to understand a complex and emerging business.

Neste creates sustainable solutions for transport, business, and consumer needs. We are the world's largest producer of renewable diesel refined from waste and residues, and our wide range of renewable products enable our customers to reduce climate emissions.

Siili Solutions is a software integrator based in Helsinki, Finland, with a strong interest in creating innovative Drupal solutions along with other technologies.