From a week’s work to a few minutes

Challenge

An everyday routine full of duplicate work

Every year, the team at Bostaden in Umeå faced the same task: taking around a hundred approved maintenance measures out of one system and entering them into another, by hand. Project by project. Row by row. It could take a whole week – every year. Now it takes a few minutes.

Gustav Midebjörk works as a maintenance planner at Bostaden in Umeå – one of northern Sweden’s largest public housing companies, with just over 16,000 apartments and around 100,000 m² of non-residential area. It’s a portfolio that requires a well-oiled machine to keep track of maintenance, projects, and resources.

Bostaden in Umeå uses Insikt as its project management system – the tool where the project managers spend their working day. Gustav, for his part, has been using Planima for just over a year to plan and prioritize maintenance strategically. But before that, they did their maintenance planning in the property system.

The problem was that the property system and Insikt didn’t talk to each other.

Before each new budget year, the team therefore had to manually transfer approved projects from one system to the other, with many manual steps.

Property designation. Measure. Project manager. Amount. Start date. Over and over, project by project, until everything was in place. A hundred projects later, a week had passed – and the risk of manual errors had been there all along.

“From the time we had decided which projects would be carried out the coming year until everything was registered as projects in Insikt, it could take up to a week. It’s around a hundred projects, with Excel lists sent back and forth, so that’s a lot of time and many steps where the human factor can come into play.”
Gustav Midebjörk, Bostaden in Umeå

Solution

Planima’s open API offered new possibilities

When Bostaden in Umeå switched to Planima just over a year ago, Gustav identified early on that these processes had to be solvable in a better way. He therefore brought in a consultant who helped him investigate what can actually be done via Planima’s open API. And it didn’t take long to find an elegant solution.

The logic is as simple as it is powerful. Gustav and his colleagues mark the measures in Planima that should be transferred to Insikt with a specific tag. The integration triggers automatically when three conditions are met: the measure is planned within the coming two-year period, has the status decided, and carries the tag Insikt. When all three conditions are met, Insikt automatically retrieves the project.

And it’s not just an empty project card that is created. The full context is transferred from Planima to Insikt:

•  The facility name and the name of the measure
•  Assigned project manager, based on the resource planning tag already applied in Planima
•  Project type, amount, and planned start date
•  A direct link to the measure in Planima – so that with one click the project manager gets to photos, descriptions, and quantities
•  If several measures are part of the same project, the integration automatically merges them into one combined project in Insikt
  
  

The project managers never need to leave their project management system to understand what needs to be done. But if they want more detail, the link to Planima is there.

“With Planima, planning upcoming projects has become much smoother. the project managers get their projects assigned at an earlier stage and therefore get more time for investigation. The API solution was yet another step in streamlining the process and enables, for example, better and more thoroughly prepared procurements than before.”
Gustav Midebjörk, Bostaden in Umeå

From idea to live in two days

What impresses just as much as the result is how quickly it was built. Linda Örtegren, Customer Success Manager at Planima, remembers the process well:

“One day Gustav got in touch and wanted a bit more information about the API. A few days later, they had already built this.”
Linda Örtegren, Planima

The consultant Gustav hired spent about two working days in total on the assignment – including trial and error to find the right logic. The investment was small, and the value is recurring, year after year.

Results

Not a one-time saving – a structural change

It’s easy to reduce this to a story about time efficiency. But it’s about more than that.

Previously, the manual process meant that the project managers got their projects late, since the transfer took time and was handled manually. Now the projects are available in Insikt as soon as a decision has been made in Planima. The project managers can plan better, request quotes in good time, and carry out proper procurements instead of having time pressure breathing down their necks.

The data descriptions are consistent and traceable, and Gustav can spend the recovered working time on what he was actually hired to do.

Gustav’s advice to others

When Gustav was asked what he would like to pass on to other property companies working with similar challenges, the answer was clear:

“Get in touch with someone who can help you with the API and configure it. It didn’t take long at all. It saves us an enormous amount of time given the number of measures we handle every year. Instead of a week from decision, it takes ten minutes to get all the measures into insikt.” – Gustav Midebjörk, Bostaden in Umeå

Planima’s open API – built for your reality

Bostaden in Umeå is one of several good examples showing that Planima’s open API isn’t a feature for tech enthusiasts. It’s a tool for property companies that want to stop doing duplicate work and let their systems work together – without having to build their own platforms from scratch.

Whether you work with Insikt, a financial system, or an internal project tool, you can connect your workflows with Planima. It doesn’t take an entire IT department. It takes the right question, a clear need, and the right person to help you configure it.

And as Gustav showed, that investment can pay for itself in both time and money – every year.

Examples of possibilities offered by Planima’s open API

So the great value of using Planima’s API is that you can automate things that today require manual handling. You no longer have to spend time, resources, and energy manually transferring information about your organizations, facilities, and maintenance measures. You also make sure nothing goes wrong along the way.

Here are some common use cases where data transfer via Planima’s API tends to create great value – along with examples of systems that could be integrated:

• Sync data on buildings, components, or facility data Sync data from Planima to, for example, Pigello, Momentum, Vitec, SWG, and more.
• Analyze and visualize data Pull data from Planima into Microsoft Power BI, Homepal, Google Looker Studio, Tableau, Qlik Sense, and more.
• Financial planning and budget Sync Planima data to Hypergene, Insikt, Planacy, Stratsys, Visma, and more.
• ESG and sustainability reporting Pull sustainability data from Planima into Position Green, Stratsys, Normative, and more.

The list isn’t exhaustive – it’s a starting point. What Gustav Midebjörk and Bostaden in Umeå showed is that technical complexity is rarely the obstacle. It’s knowing what’s possible.