Case Study: e-Estonia streamlines the national population census with Helmes

Estonia - Customer Case Study

The customer e-Estonia, through its agency Statistics Estonia, faced the challenge of conducting a national census with two technically outdated 15-year-old legacy systems. These systems hindered data collection, and with public participation being voluntary, the agency needed a more user-friendly solution to motivate respondents and reduce the resource-intensive process of manual follow-ups. The vendor Helmes was engaged to develop a new data collection application.

Helmes designed and built a new GDPR-compliant online platform from scratch using Java and open-source technologies. The innovative solution pre-filled data from over 30 state registers, drastically reducing the survey completion time from 51 minutes to just 5 minutes. This user-centric approach led to 43% of the population completing the census online, saving a combined 54,519 workdays and significantly increasing efficiency for Statistics Estonia.

e-Estonia

Marika Korka

Data Collection Team Lead