Viken Fiber has hundreds of contractors performing thousands of assignments every year. To manage their corporate customer projects they were using Trello. This platform didn’t meet their needs for automation and integrations, and when the new GDPR regulations on storing personal data in the US hit, it was incompliant. They needed to replace it with a tailored solution – fast.
Their existing solution had no logic connected to it and didn’t integrate with their other systems or API’s. Communication with contractors happened mainly through emails. However, it was still better than working in excel, and the layout gave them a good overview of the project flow.
“We wanted to develop on the structure of a kanban board, with different statuses and order management for Viken Fiber internally and our contractors. The idea was to eliminate all emails regarding orders and projects, and instead have all communication and status updates stored in one system,” says Project Manager at Viken Fiber, Jørn Elstrøm.
“Being part of larger organizations, we have been through our fair share of restructuring of software. We know that coding is costly and takes a long time, and this was time we didn’t have. We were very excited when we realized there was a way to achieve this that was much faster than with coding,” Elstrøm says.
Shortly after the initial meetings with Appfarm where Viken Fiber shared their functionality needs as well as their thoughts on design, they were presented with a proposal and an environment to test the solution on. After testing they could request additional functionality.
“We were able to continuously keep building on the application, and our requests for new functionality became available in the solution extremely fast,” Elstrøm says.
Soon they were facing a new requirement: the integration of an advanced Health and Safety-plan (SHA) for their contractors. The SHA plan affected all their customer segments, not only the corporate customers which their Trello replacement had been focused towards.
They began exploring the options for off-the-shelf products, but discovered these were all relatively costly, neither of them integrated with other systems, nor did they meet Viken Fiber’s needs perfectly. They decided to customize and incorporate a SHA plan into their Appfarm solution.
“We quickly realized the benefit of having this tied in the system that contained orders and assignments, rather than having it as an extra system living on the side,” says Director of Planning & Development at Viken Fiber, Stian Berg.
This meant that the system they had built to replace Trello for their corporate customers, now had to incorporate project management for all customer segments. That way they could ensure that all assignments went through their SHA component.
“It has now grown into a much larger system than initially thought, which all departments are using to perform their tasks and assignments. We have solved so many of our issues in such a short period of time,” Berg says.
Viken Fiber, who is part of Lyse and Altibox, has become a big organization with several different processes spanning across departments, contractors and customers. The ability to streamline and automate these means they are able to save a considerable amount of money.
“There is no doubt that this system is ten times better than what we had. With Appfarm we have streamlined so many of our operations, and we have more than earned back the cost of development," Berg says.
Now they are looking at several other needs they wish to solve with no-code after seing savings of cost and time by developing this way.
“I am very happy and satisfied with the way Appfarm has worked for us. The fact that we don’t have to spend time on coding, databases, and hosting is very valuable. Our needs can be rough around the edges, and Appfarm delivers testable solutions at the speed of light compared to other projects I’ve been involved in. It’s a joy to see,” Berg finishes.
