How a Finnish Beverage Company Built the Foundation for Data Governance

About the client

Olvi is a well-known Finnish beverage company and brewery group with a long history and a modern approach to data and analytics. Since November 2022, Olvi has been using Dawiso as a central platform to document business definitions and build a consistent structure for data-related knowledge across the group.

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The challenge

As Olvi continued to grow as a group of companies, the need for commonly agreed business definitions became increasingly important. Teams were working with assumptions rather than shared definitions, and there was no single place where business terms could be defined, discussed, and maintained together.

Olvi was looking for:

• A centralized place to define business terms across multiple domains
• A tool that business users could easily adopt
• Reasonable pricing without the overhead of large, highly technical platforms

Many existing data governance tools felt too complex, too technical, or too expensive for the scope Olvi wanted to start with.

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The solution

Olvi chose Dawiso because of its business-oriented approach, usability, and reasonable pricing. Instead of starting with heavy technical governance, they focused on building a clear structure for business definitions that could evolve over time.

They organized Dawiso into nine thematic spaces, such as finance, procurement, environmental topics, and general business concepts. Each space contains its own set of business terms, allowing teams to work independently while still contributing to a shared platform.

To support this structure, Dawiso was customized to reflect Olvi’s real needs:

• Tokenization and autolinking were adjusted to prevent unwanted cross-references between similarly named terms in different spaces.
• Custom templates guide users when creating new business terms, helping ensure consistency and clarity.
• Terminology was adapted to match internal language, for example replacing “business owner” with “data owner.”
• Custom metadata filters allow Olvi to scan only relevant parts of their Oracle databases using Dawiso’s on-premises scanner.
• Custom search behavior was fine-tuned to reduce noise from similarly named objects.

Olvi also integrated Dawiso’s Database API to extract metadata insights directly into their reporting environment.

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The impact

While Olvi sees data governance as a gradual journey rather than a one-time transformation, Dawiso has already delivered clear value:

• A single, shared place to define and maintain business terms
• A structured way to build commonly agreed definitions across the group
• Clear ownership and better visibility into how different teams define and use data
• A practical foundation for future harmonization and data democratization

“Dawiso gave us a place where we can define things together. Earlier, a lot of definitions were based on assumptions. Now we have a common structure across the group to document what our data actually means. We may not be fully harmonized yet, but we finally have a clear path to get there.”

Ville Paloniemi, Data Development Manager from Olvi

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Adoption varies across teams, which Olvi sees as natural. What matters most is that the structure now exists and is actively used. Olvi also plans to improve visibility into reporting layers, helping users better understand what data is used in reports and dashboards.

Rather than rushing adoption, Olvi is taking a step-by-step approach. Dawiso supports this by providing a flexible platform that allows teams to start small and gradually expand their documentation. New features such as “Help Me Write”, which helps generate descriptions based on scanned metadata and context, are seen as a practical way to support data teams and reduce the effort needed to document technical assets.

“For us, data democratization is the key. Dawiso is the path toward that.”

Ville Paloniemi, Data Development Manager from Olvi