Hansel helps find the perfect partner for a project

The Maaseutuparlamentti event will be held in Nurmo in the autumn of 2024 for people interested in the development of the countryside, and thousands are expected to participate on site and offline. The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, which is organising the event, decided to entrust Hansel with the event’s tendering.

Maaseutuparlamentti is a national discussion forum for anyone interested in building the future of Finland’s countryside. In 2024, some 2,500 live attendees are expected in Nurmo, with a further 3,000 expected to attend the webinar. Such a major event requires considerable organising and management of different areas from programme conceptualisation to event production and technical engineering with dozens of partners providing their services.

“Maaseutuparlamentti is a multi-format event that we organise in cooperation with dozens of partners. Experience tells us that a successful event takes effective coordination, management, and above all a constructive spirit. We needed a solid expert to produce our event,” says special advisor Antonia Husberg of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.

The DPS of Hansel’s Communication and Marketing Services unit served as an excellent platform for tenders. Advised by the Hansel Procurement Support team, the organisers chose the MinikisaPlus implementation model, in which the customer specifies what needs to be procured and the Hansel team organises the tendering. Husberg was joined by procurement expert Petri Hakala and legal expert Antti Tuukkanen. DPS category manager Anni Airaksinen was also closely involved with the project. Naturally, the project started with a detailed specification of what the customer needed to procure.

Thanks to the accuracy of the specification work, the result was a success.

“It takes a good of amount of time to describe the procurement for such a large event. Fortunately, we could rely on good base data from previous events. After we had specified everything we wanted to procure, the document had expanded to 11 pages,” says Husberg with a laugh.

Hakala and Tuukkanen supported Husberg throughout the tendering project. Their expertise was particularly useful in setting requirements for specialists and defining the comparison criteria and scoring of the tenders. The DPS had good templates that steered the work in the right direction. Good use was also made of the opportunity for market dialogue, and suppliers were afforded questions and comments at the drafting stage of the request for tenders.

“We always recommend market dialogue for our customers, especially for large-scale tendering. The replies and comments often help them fine-tune their request and therefore receive better tenders,” says Hakala.

In this case, the tenders were evaluated in terms of the specialists’ experience and the tenderer’s description of the service content, weighed at 60 per cent, and the price of the tender, weighed at 40 per cent. The tenderers were required to produce a concept of the marketing material and the event’s main stage, as well as to describe how local character would be included in the event’s theme.

Good groundwork clearly paid off, as the winning tender was an excellent match for the customer’s needs. Markkinointiosakeyhtiö I2 was chosen as the supplier.

“The assistance of Hansel’s experts was invaluable in this project. They ensured that the project proceeded on schedule and discussed factors that we might have missed. We now have a properly tendered whole that accounts for all relevant details. Our cooperation with the supplier has started well, and our event preparations are proceeding as planned,” says Husberg.

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