New category develops through cooperation

Category Managers Janne Väisänen and Pia Ritari describe the year 2025 as extremely busy. They prepared new joint procurements for the needs of the wellbeing services counties at a rapid pace. The first minicompetitions for housing services for people with disabilities began already in late 2024 and for child protection services and services for families with children in April 2025. Category managers have been working closely with customers, the industry and other Hansel employees to make the procurement solutions as functional as possible.

At the moment, Hansel’s social welfare and healthcare services offering is focused on services where purchasing services play a significant role. In these, joint procurement achieves the greatest benefits.

“The impact of joint procurement increases as the number of customers increases. I am highly motivated by the societal significance and importance of work. One example of the impact of procurement is the ethical operating model for service procurement developed at Hansel, which benefits our joint procurement customers,” Janne says.

Joint procurement makes day-to-day work smoother

Social welfare and healthcare service providers have welcomed the aim that tenders with Hansel’s customers using joint procurements would be carried out with the same formula more than before. More harmonised calls for tenders and contract terms make day-to-day work easier when not having a completely different procedure for every wellbeing services county.

“The importance of market dialogue cannot be overemphasised when carrying out public procurement of this size and duration. Providing services to Hansel’s customers has attracted industry operators extensively, and two joint procurements already involve more than two hundred contractual suppliers from different parts of Finland, which is a great thing,” Pia says.

Customers benefit, among other things, from the fact that joint procurement achieves a volume advantage and cost efficiency, as well as from Hansel’s centralised contract monitoring on behalf of customers. Janne and Pia, experienced procurers of social welfare and health services, emphasise that joint procurement and its tendering processes must be continuously developed in order to achieve the desired benefits. In practice, this may mean, for example, continuous monitoring of the market and regulations to ensure that procurement is carried out appropriately and cost-effectively. Both social welfare and healthcare category managers have strong area expertise, and they also assist customers in minicompetitions by offering new perspectives on requests for tenders.

“I like to arrange tendering for services in particular, as it allows you to think about the work and processes carried out by people,” Janne says.

Pia adds:

“We can offer our customers resources for strategically truly important procurements. Together, we consider the factors affecting the cost structure and assess, among other things, what kind of a requirement level is worth paying for and what kinds of comparison criteria work.”

The planning of new joint procurements for this category is in full swing, and Janne and Pia are working on preparing them. They hope to continue to receive a lot of feedback from customers on what kinds of procurement needs need to be met.

 

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