Introduction
The over 900-year-old city of Helsingborg sees the main responsibility of a municipality to be to provide its citizens, companies and institutions with services, map information being an important one of them. To do this effectively, the City Construction Administration started looking for a new solution to replace the old UNIX-based CAD system. "What we wanted was a system that we could use with normal PC workstations," says Lars Kvarnström, Head of the cartographic department of City Construction Administration.
Tekla Municipality GIS fulfilled Helsingborg's requirements, and confidence in Tekla was further enhanced by the city's energy company Helsingborg Energy that was extremely pleased with its Tekla NIS network information system for electricity distribution, purchased two years earlier. "Tekla's system is a ready-made solution," Kvarnström says, explaining that it had all the applications the city needed. As Tekla Solution was introduced, Helsingborg had to face the challenges of fixing old data during the conversion and of going from the UNIX environment to the PC world. Today, however, the whole solution is up and running, and the city is pleased with the advantages that it has brought about in terms of improved functionality, quicker information sharing, better service and modern 3D possibilities. Tekla was actively involved in the whole process, understanding its client's needs and requirements. "We spoke the same language," is how Kvarnström sums it up.
“We got a ready-made solution”
After a thorough evaluation, it was clear that Tekla Solution was going to be the choice for several reasons. “First and foremost, Tekla Solution concists of ready-made applications. We didn’t have to develop applications ourselves, which would have required programming expertise and taken up a lot of time. Tekla Solution for municipalities also had all the applications we needed so we didn’t feel that we wasted money on a lot of fancy applications that we had no use of” Kvarnström says.
As cooperation continued, the people in Helsingborg grew more and more convinced that they had made the right choice. When they visited Tekla they realized that the solution provider understood clients’ needs and requirements. “We spoke the same language”, is how Kvarnström summed it up.
Tekla Solution changes the way of thinking
The project with converting data started in June 1999. By December all the data was converted and the old system taken out of use. “One of the challenges we faced during the conversion was that the links in the old system had not been properly done so when converting the material into Tekla's solution we had to put quite some time in, fixing them. We also used a lot of training since going from the UNIX environment to the PC world called for a whole new way of thinking”, Kvarnström says and continues, “Tekla Solution is a logical system and it will take some time to think and work with a database instead of files”.
Today the whole solution is up and running. Tekla modules they are using at the present are the analysis, plan, and land register certificate applications as well as Tekla Webmap, later on terrain model application.
Tekla has been actively involved in the whole process, from providing the software, consulting, installation and user training, The advantages with Tekla Solution are obvious, and among other things the functionality has improved considerably. They can nowadays use and spread the information in the database much better and quicker within the whole municipality, which means being able to give better service. Other advantages are that different clients in different places can use the same database and the possibility to integrate orthographical pictures as complement to the map database. Important are also the 3D possibilities of Tekla Solution.
“Within the end of this year we hope that the whole municipality’s operative activities will be using the Web based clients of Tekla Solution”, Kvarnström concludes.