Alvesta Municipality: Cutting build time from 1 week to 2 days while bringing integrations in-house

In a small Swedish municipality, two people are quietly transforming how an entire organization communicates with itself and its residents. There are no dramatic system failures in their story or a crisis that forced a rethink. What drove Alvesta Municipality to change was something subtler and, in many ways, more frustrating: a dependency that had become so embedded in everyday operations that the IT team had stopped noticing how much it was costing them.

Dzumret Pelivani, development manager, and Aslan Khadizov, system developer, make up Alvesta’s entire integration team. By migrating to Frends, they have successfully replaced a consultant-dependent legacy platform and started automating manual processes that had been quietly draining hours from their colleagues’ working days.

The result? They built around 25 integrations in under six months. One integration alone is projected to save the municipality tens of thousands of Swedish crowns per year.

This is how they got there.

A platform that worked but held them back

Alvesta’s previous integration platform was functional. It handled what it needed to handle. But every time the municipality needed a new integration or a change to an existing one, the process was the same: call the consultants, explain the requirement, wait, pay and receive something back that the internal team couldn’t read.

The platform was built on old-style VBScript, and the processes were largely closed: difficult to inspect, difficult to debug and nearly impossible to modify without external help. When something went wrong, tracing the cause was time-consuming. Building something new could take a week. And each integration cost around 10,000 SEK to commission.

"It was working, but we were dependent on the company behind the product," Dzumret explains. "It’s not complex, but it takes time to do something. With Frends, it’s much easier because you have all the components open. You can just try and fail, but you will learn. That was not the case before. If you don’t understand why you failed, that’s it."

The black-box nature of the platform compounded the problem. Error messages appeared, but the root cause was buried. Finding it wasn’t impossible, but it was slow — and slow meant expensive, both in terms of time and consultant hours.

The decision to migrate was triggered by a question: what could we do if we actually had control?

Alvesta first heard about Frends from a nearby municipality, Älmhult, which had already started using the platform. In the public sector, that kind of peer recommendation carries weight, but like most decisions, the path from interest to adoption must involve a thorough analysis and a tender process before any commitment is made. 

Dzumret and Aslan also did their investigation: checked out the website, reviewed the capabilities and started asking the questions that matter in municipal IT: Is this modern? Does it support APIs? Does it give us visibility? Can we own it ourselves? The answers were yes.

An inventory-first approach to migration

Before writing a single process in Frends, Alvesta did something that would shape everything that followed: they took stock of every integration they had. They classified their existing processes into three categories: ones they could build themselves with no help; ones they could probably manage with some guidance; and ones they suspected required external support.

That classification then became a starting point for structured onboarding sessions with the Frends team. Together, they reviewed the list, assessed the complexity of what needed to be migrated and built a shared picture of the work ahead. The sessions started weekly, then moved to every two weeks, then every three, as Alvesta’s confidence grew and the questions became less frequent.

"We could build two or three processes in a week and then get a question session. If we were stuck somewhere, we could continue from there. It was a good approach," Dzumret says.

As it turned out, the three-tier classification collapsed into two in practice. Most of the integrations Alvesta had flagged as potentially needing Frends’ help to build, they ended up building themselves. Even the hardest ones. The combination of Aslan’s development skills and Dzumret’s deep domain knowledge of Alvesta’s backend systems meant the pair rarely hit a wall they couldn’t work through.

Learning by doing — and learning fast — turned out to be the most effective approach. Starting with simpler processes gave them the foundation to tackle more complex ones. And because Frends provides both a development and a production environment, they could test freely, fail safely, and understand exactly why something wasn’t working.

"Frends is easy. The components are self-explanatory. You take a trigger, you string components together in the way that you think it’s going to work, and you can try. If it fails, you learn."
Dzumret Pelivani, development manager, Alvesta Municipality

25 integrations in six months with two people

Six months after going live, Alvesta had built around 25 integration processes in Frends. All of them in-house, no consultants.

The financial case is compelling, too. One integration currently in development — connecting an employee education portal to Alvesta’s internal systems so new staff can log in from day one — will save tens of thousands of Swedish crowns per year compared to buying the same functionality from a vendor.

The systems they’re connecting span the breadth of municipal operations: HR data, ERP and economic systems, school systems, electricity measurement data from their energy company, file transfers between departments and increasingly, API connections between internal systems that previously had no way to talk to each other.

Some of what they’ve built wasn’t a migration at all. Once they saw what Frends could do, they started identifying processes that had never been automated, like manual tasks that staff had been doing by hand, simply because the old platform wasn’t accessible enough to make automation viable.

Hours saved, costs avoided, people freed

The operational impact has been immediate and concrete. One example: Alvesta’s HR system wasn’t automatically writing employee email addresses back to the relevant system. Every time a new employee joined the municipality, someone had to go in and enter the email address manually. A small task in isolation. Compounded across every new hire, it added up to hours per month for one employee.

That’s now done automatically through Frends, nobody needs to touch it. And it runs in seconds.

A similar story played out in the IT helpdesk. Alvesta had two separate ticketing systems: one for the IT department and one for the call center that handles citizen and staff requests. They couldn’t communicate with each other, which meant calls that should have gone to the call center were going directly to IT instead. With a Frends integration connecting the two systems via API, that workflow was corrected. Now, calls are routed correctly, and the IT team gets to focus on IT work.

"So that’s the economic benefit. And also goodwill, modernization, digitalization," Dzumret says.

Deliberate growth over speed

One detail worth noting: Alvesta has not broadly publicized its integration capability internally. This is intentional. With a team of two, managing demand matters as much as meeting it.

Colleagues don’t yet know the full extent of what’s possible, not because Dzumret and Aslan are keeping secrets, but because being overwhelmed with requests doesn’t serve anyone.

Instead, automation initiatives flow through a digitalization group within the municipality that receives input from across the organization, including from Alvesta’s three or four associated companies. That group acts as a filter, prioritizing what’s most valuable and sequencing work in a way the IT team can sustain.

That same discipline shows up in how they think about the goal. Dzumret is clear that time savings, while real and measurable, aren’t the endpoint.

"In the end, it’s not going to be about saving time. It’s going to be about quality of service, actually. You can save time, yes, but you will come to the point where time saving is not the thing — it’s just the quality of what you’re delivering. That’s the goal."
Dzumret Pelivani, development manager, Alvesta Municipality

What comes next

Alvesta is also moving toward a new ERP system with a direct bank connection, which means some processes that remain in the previous platform today will simply be superseded, not migrated. The ones that matter have already been moved. And increasingly, new work in Frends isn’t migration at all.

Alvesta began exploring Frends' AI capabilities. Dzumret has used the built-in AI chat in the Frends platform to work through process design questions and found it useful. Data sovereignty is also on the agenda. Sensitive data stays within Swedish infrastructure as a principle, and Frends gives the team the transparency to know exactly where data moves and to clean or filter it when systems don’t have built-in mechanisms for that.

For a municipality handling citizen data, visibility matters.