öGIG: 2 hours saved per day on building inspections
How öGIG has completely digitalised fibre expansion in Austria
The Austrian Fibre Infrastructure Company (öGIG) boasts 117 employees and has been working on sustainable infrastructure projects since 2019. The company primarily provides rural areas in Austria with fibre networks, boosting digitalisation at a local level.
öGIG can step in at any point of a property’s life cycle. In new buildings, the fibre systems are taken into account in the planning phase. They can also be retrofitted or added as part of renovations. The company primarily installs fibre cables in residential complexes, but also undertakes projects that offer futureproof broadband for commercial properties and logistics centres.
Michael Burger is head of real estate at öGIG and is responsible for the building acquisition sales team. He focuses on the technical and commercial feasibility of residential and commercial properties. Apartment buildings are subject to inspections to assess whether fibre installation is possible. This whole process is undertaken in PlanRadar.
“Each home or unit is created, sketched out and evaluated in PlanRadar. The customisable forms and exports can be perfectly matched to our work processes,” explained Sales Engineer Lucas Bredenfeldt.
The challenge: paper and pen home inspections don’t scale
Before PlanRadar was used, building inspections were conducted with pen and paper and photos on smartphones. Workers had to either make a mental note of information for later, or document it by hand.
The digitalisation that came along with the switch to the PlanRadar platform also solved several other problems that the company had encountered on a daily basis: documentation and reporting issues. “We now have the option of carefully following where we are at with homes and commercial buildings at project level. We no longer have to store data separately in different places. Instead, we save all the information in a neat structure within the platform. Reliable recording of data and the related reporting processes are important to us,” Christoph Auburn explained.
The solution: PlanRadar for digitalisation of documentation & analysis
When the company wanted to switch to a digital solution, they tested several options. öGIG were quick to choose PlanRadar due to the easy analysis options, which play an important role for them.
To tailor the platform to the needs of the relevant work processes, different process variants were tested. The solution worked very well for the initial inspections and users were then able to identify which types of analysis and reports were required in practice. öGIG chose a process that focused on work with tickets and ticket reports.
As the work steps were clearly defined, the team could quickly adapt to the new workflow. “Working with PlanRadar, positioning and completing tickets, and performing analyses are all intuitive and no major training phase is necessary. So the work process is straightforward,” said Lukas Bredenfeldt. However, training sessions will be offered in future for project observers to explain the analysis options and reports in detail.
New areas for fibre expansion are created as projects in the work process. The projects are positioned in the form of tickets, with the ticket status displaying the inspection or building progress. Photos of cabling options are taken on site and the relevant information is precisely noted on photos. Cost estimations are added to the interactive form in the ticket and comments and other information about the property follow. All this data can also be found in tables in Excel lists that can be analysed to produce a cost overview.
The result: öGIG is saving time and money and has gone completely paperless
The aim for the move to a digital solution was to do away with pen and paper for daily work and to be able to document information in clearly structured formats. At the end of a day that is packed with building inspections, this data should now already have been added in the platform, without the company needing to take note of any more information.
Achieving the aim of fully digital documentation was quick with PlanRadar. öGIG is also saving a significant amount of time and money through the digitalised work processes.
Michael Burger explained the benefits: “We now have one report, with photos, which we only need to save. In the past, when we worked with pen and paper, photos needed to be scanned in first and saved separately. We’ve saved the equivalent of two back-office staff – of a total of just four employees! This represents staff savings of almost 25%”. “On site, we save up to 2 hours a day. This time can then be used for more inspections,” Christoph Auböck added.
In just a few months, 40 projects have been undertaken and over 1000 tickets created with PlanRadar. The scalability means that the company expects to have created over 2000 tickets soon.
