Linnanmäki, the biggest amusement park in Finland, doesn’t exist only for the joy of kids, but to also support the Finnish child welfare work with the collected funds. “Linnanmäki has a societal purpose. Last year the amount of donated funds was 3.9 million euros and this year’s goal rises to 4.1 million”, says the Finance Director Henrik Johansson from the Children’s Day Foundation.
In the year 1950 six associations working for child welfare founded Linnanmäki amusement park. Seven years later these associations founded the Children’s Day Foundation which collects funds for child welfare work by operating an amusement park. Linnanmäki has the most rides within the Nordic amusement parks, a total of 43 of them.
The Children’s Day Foundation is a valuable partner of Zoined and a very interesting customer because of their business idea. The organization’s way to act for common good has made an impact on Zoined and inspired to develop the service further so that the Children’s Day Foundation could reach their donation goals. The Foundation has been a really active partner in this process.
Zoined Senior Sales Manager, Timo Länkelä, interviewed Finance Director Henrik Johansson from the Children’s Day Foundation.
Seasonality challenges in reporting
Linnanmäki doesn’t operate in the traditional quarterly cycle, but in a completely different one. “For example now we are already planning the year 2019. In autumns we prepare the next summer and when the summer season is on, we have to be able to trust the preparations made in the previous winter and spring. During the season we just focus on following that everything goes as planned”, Johansson describes.
Zoined has a big part in this cyclical follow-up process. Johansson lists: “We deliver Zoined’s daily email reports automatically to all permanent employees. The reports are modified based on the field of work: The management team and other managers receive a bit more extensive information package than others, but everyone knows how much was yesterday’s sales, cumulative sales and visitor counts. The seasonal managers get also the sales and visitor counts of the whole week and the board receives their own weekly report of last week’s sales, automatically.”
Johansson wanted to automate the daily reporting process and Zoined has done a great job there. Johansson looks back how the cooperation started to run smoothly after some early stage hick-ups: “When I was still new in the position myself, I wasn’t completely assured of our need for Zoined. However, I wanted to develop our internal accounting and especially the follow-up and analysis on the sales. I surveyed also other analytics tools in the market but quite fast I noticed that Zoined responded to our needs best. At that point the Zoined service had also developed further, so we took it into use.”
Automating the reporting has been a good decision. “Everyone is very interested in the email reports and creating them is so easy. It’s very fast when you know what you want”, Johansson says. Taking the service into use was really easy and learning to use it took only a couple of hours. The introduction training provided by Zoined made learning easy and now Johansson has for example hidden the metrics that are lower priority, so that he can see all relevant data with just one glance.
On top of the details
Johansson is the admin user of Zoined service and has found his own key metrics that he needs: ”Using the service is easy and fast. I have configured the email reports as we want them and on the dashboard side I follow specifically certain categories, for example the volumes, total sums and average prices of wristbands sold. I also follow generally the average sales concerning wristbands, kiosks and games.”
Also the kiosks and cafes of Linnanmäki use the service a lot. “They think it’s a great tool. They follow particularly the hourly sales, which helps planning the shifts. The ticket sale follows the sales also on sales person level, and they even organized a sales competition for a specific product, which clearly improved in sales!”, Johansson says.
“Zoined has simply saved a lot of working time. It also helps to keep the assortment in order and brings transparency. When you pick all products of a category to one report, you can quickly see all the products which are not in use anymore and can now be cleaned away from the POS system. Because the service works close to real time and brings transparency, now everyone knows where we are going. Thus Zoined also helps to motivate our employees and make them more committed”, Johansson commends.
The Linnanmäki Carnival of Lights is here again for the tenth time on 10.-18.10.2015 from 1PM to 10PM with the most luminous stars of the country on stage! The entrance and the program are free of charge.
