When Älmhult Municipality adopted a holistic approach to their digitalization journey, it became evident that implementing an integration platform to unify their development solutions was necessary.
Business Goals
Älmhult Municipality is situated in Småland with a population of approximately 18,000 residents. A few years ago, the municipality developed a digitalization plan outlining how welfare, education, job market, and community development could be enhanced. As the plan was developed, it became evident that numerous processes required streamlining and automation, benefiting both the municipality employees and residents. Therefore, a collaboration together with Frends iPaaS was initiated.
Now, Älmhult Municipality can seamlessly move and refine data across its diverse IT systems. Integration solutions are no longer scattered and reliant on specific individuals but are accessible to all within the organization. This has led to a reduction in development time for implementing new features.
"Frends integration platform met all our pre-set requirements and was also very easy to start using. Even employees who are not very tech-savvy can easily initiate developments of new integrations," says Kim Franzén, IT Architect at Älmhult Municipality.
With Frends, we lower the barrier of starting new projects which is a significant advantage for us as a small organization -Kim Franzén, Älmhults kommun
Integration Challenges
Älmhult Municipality had previously utilized various integration solutions, often resorting to custom and vendor-specific solutions scattered across the different IT environments and servers. This resulted in disorganization and inefficiency, leading to prolonged development times for both existing and new integrations. Furthermore, many solutions were dependent on specific individuals, as only the developer for the integration could troubleshoot when issues arose.
“When a colleague left, we lost the knowledge of the integrations they had built because everything was a custom solution. Additionally, we felt the need to generate a new solution every time a new integration was required due to the complexity of reusing previous work. This resulted in a barrier that proved too high for integrating programs, “continues Kim Franzén.
Frends iPaaS emerged as the solution, and today Älmhult Municipality is migrating and replacing all custom solutions.
Results
After using Frends platform for approximately 1.5 years, Älmhult Municipality currently has around 30 integrations in the production environment and approximately 200 in the development environment. The primary purpose of using the platform is to facilitate the seamless movement of data between different systems. This includes, for example, the automated delivery of accounting files to the financial system.
Furthermore, the platform is also utilized for E-services, automating the entry of information in various forms that previously required manual input. The municipality is actively working on an onboarding project, where several steps in the process have been automated. Additionally, the Frends integration platform plays a vital role in their data warehouse, among other functionalities it contributes to automation and authorization.
“Frends is an excellent partner. They are skilled at organizing events that showcase potential solutions and provide opportunities for us to connect with other customers in the same field. They encourage us to draw inspiration from each other and have even initiated a municipal forum where we can actively share solutions— an uncommon and highly appreciated initiative! It's evident that the product itself is valuable for Frends, not just the consulting hours,” Kim Franzén, IT Architect at Älmhult Municipality.
Future Plans
The work to migrate old integrations is in full swing for Älmhult Municipality. The plan going forward is to use Frends integration platform as their primary solution, enabling the digitalization journey by automating manual processes.
In the future, Älmhult aims to involve additional roles in the Frends platform, such as system administrators who can independently monitor integrations linked to their operational systems.
“Things are happening all the time! It's entirely new for us to have the ability to develop so much on our own with the resources we have. The most important thing is that everything we do benefits the residents in the municipality, and by automating repetitive work, we have more time to support the municipality residents,” continues Kim Franzén.
With Frends, Älmhult Municipality has been able to:
- Save costs and time
- Simplify the movement and refinement of data between various systems
- Eliminate scattered and person-dependent integration solutions
Results
- Improved processes
- Shortened development time
- Increased qualiy