Efficient and quality processes with Tekla Solution for municipalities
– For many of us, it is now difficult to imagine how anything could have been done before Tekla's software solution, says Ilkka Saarimäki, the City Geodesist of the Turku Municipal Property Corporation. The City of Turku has been involved in developing Tekla's software product and applications from the very beginning, and the solution has become the core of different technical processes of the city.
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Turku has been using Tekla software since 1987. In the beginning, they had Tekla’s Teklis, which at the time was the only database-based system for managing map information on the market.
– We did consider other alternatives but found them to be significantly less advanced. In hindsight it’s easy to say that we made the right decision not only back then, but many times over as we haven’t fallen into the trap of changing to a new system every few years. Tekla's software solution has progressively evolved over the years to answer new demands that could never have been anticipated in the first place, says Ilkka Saarimäki, the City Geodesist of the Turku Municipal Property Corporation.
Development needs for Teklis launched a development project for Tekla Xcity in the beginning of the 1990s, and Turku joined the project along with several other major Finnish cities. In the late 1990s, the need for a more functional method for storing register data arose in Turku and in a number of other Finnish municipalities.
– The Tekla Xcity register project was set in motion in 2001 and the system was already being used the following year. Despite the tight schedule, everything from timetable to budget went according to plan, Saarimäki says.
At the moment, the former Tekla Xcity, renamed in 2011 as Tekla Municipality GIS, is in use in six City of Turku units including the Municipal Property Corporation, Environmental and City Planning Office, Municipal Engineering Corporation, Municipal Green Area Corporation, Turku Energia and Municipal Waterworks Corporation. Tekla Webmap is used in fourteen units, including Municipal Property Corporation, Environmental and City Planning Office, Turku Energia and Municipal Waterworks Corporation. The total number of Tekla Webmap users is approximately 420 and the number of Tekla Municipality GIS users is approximately 150.
– Tekla Municipality GIS is mostly used in the maintenance of basic geographic and register materials. Unlike before, both kinds of data are now entered in one go by the same person. This basic work is mostly conducted by staff in technical units and the public utility companies, describes Saarimäki.
Once entered into the system, data is immediately available to Tekla Municipality GIS and Tekla Webmap users across administrative branches. The information is utilized in an increasingly wide range of tasks, from land-use planning, property management and building control to the planning of school and health care district divisions based on population data. In Saarimäki’s view, Tekla software solution has significantly enhanced both the quality and efficiency of many work processes.
– Before Tekla's system, you had to run around looking for maps and other paper documents from archives and from other people’s desks, take photocopies and return the papers. Now versatile, always up-to-date information is available with a click of a mouse. The depth of preparatory and planning work has increased tremendously. Easy access to data has also proven to be a highly valuable tool in meetings and in customer service situations.
– For many of us it’s now difficult to imagine how anything could have been done before Tekla solution. Even the city’s lawyer at the City Office has said he could not perform his tasks without it.
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In addition to the improved cost-efficiency and service in various city departments, the residents of Turku and surrounding areas have benefited from Tekla's solution in the form of map services. The City of Turku Municipal Property Corporation produces a guide map comprising of 16 municipalities and covering a total population of 350,000. The Tekla GIS-based internet map service located on the city’s website attracts around 6,000 users every day.
In the guide map cooperation model, municipalities send any changed data to Turku which in turn updates the information to the database and provides the municipalities with printed map products if needed. Even though municipality mergers have reduced the number of municipalities that are involved in the regional cooperation from 24 to 16, the area covered by the service has expanded so that the Turku region has Finland’s largest map service area on the Internet.
– The Internet service has been warmly welcomed by the surrounding municipalities which would not have had the resources to implement a similar project on their own on, says Saarimäki.
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Tekla Solution for municipalities has been used in the Turku region in regional cooperation with the town of Kaarina for approximately two years. In the regional cooperation model, Turku offers Tekla Municipality GIS and its databases to be used by the cooperating municipality or city. The municipality can therefore direct its resources better and concentrate on essentials, i.e. saving, maintaining and utilizing data.
– In land use planning and the planning of public transportation, municipal borders are no longer restrictive – there are activities across municipal borders. Since we share the database and data storage with Kaarina, the data is instantly available to everyone. This is a cost-efficient solution for both of us, Saarimäki says.
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At the moment, Turku is collecting information about general areas, such as streets, parks and green areas for the Street and park area application, and starting to utilize the applications more widely. The amount of collected data is massive and the city is slowly beginning to truly utilize this mass.
– Public structures are a big part of the city’s assets. Earlier, we did not know the exact extent of our assets, Saarimäki remarks.
When up-to-date data is available in one central solution, it is easier to plan maintenance actions of general areas efficiently and call for tenders for maintenance.
– In Turku, we collect a lot of information about streets and parks and we commission the actual maintenance work from subcontractors. Before the Street and park area application, we did not know exactly what the target of the call for tenders was. Now the maintenance tenders are based on facts.
With the help of Tekla Municipality GIS, assessing maintenance investments has also become easier and more accurate.
– When planning maintenance actions, it is easy to get a reality-based cross-section of the state of the property and how much should be dedicated to repairing investments yearly. Earlier, this was a massive task and the result was merely a rough estimate of investment needs. The city’s property is worth tens of millions, and at the end, the cost of making the Street and park area application cost was little compared to this.
Saarimäki predicts that the solution holds a lot more that can be utilized.
– The benefits of Tekla Solution increase all the time. A few years ago we could not even realize all of the benefits.
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Turku is planning to implement an interface to a document management system. The plan is to utilize information entered to the document management system through Tekla Municipality GIS and Tekla WebMap.
– The interface eliminates the need to search for materials in archives for good. The data is available to everyone. When data is transformed to electronic form, it will become available with a click of the mouse. This saves time and makes operations more efficient. Since the original materials are susceptible to physical damages, a digital disk provides a new sort of back-up copy of the data too, Saarimäki says.
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With the Tekla mobile applications, register data can be read and written directly in the field. In Turku, the application is most actively used in the Municipal Green Area Corporation, where experts use it to save properties and data on the condition of trees. Saarimäki thinks the solution is fast and saves the expert’s time.
– When analyzing trees, the mobile device is excellent. The tree expert may have thousands of trees which are processed individually. With a GPS, you can define the location of the tree, and record its condition and properties for the tree while standing right next to it. The record is ready straight away – unlike in the past when they had to take printouts with them to the park, and update notes written on the printouts to the system when they got back in the office. Digital data is easy to maintain and it makes work faster. This is clearly a question of costs, says Saarimäki.
With Offline functionalities, browsing for information in Tekla Municipality GIS is possible in the field without a connection to the database. In Turku, the functionalities are in use at the Municipal Waterworks Corporation which has a 24/7 duty for fault situations. If, for example, there is a leakage somewhere and water pours on to the street, the utility workers can go to the spot immediately with data on the mobile device. The device quickly shows which valve should be closed to stop the leakage.
– Without mobile information people should always carry a large number of maps with them, and the paper versions would quickly become obsolete, Saarimäki remarks.
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Turku uses all the eServices Tekla has produced so far. With the help of these applications, municipalities can offer its inhabitants services in which the information is recorded on an electronic desktop that both the customer and the authorities can view and supplement.
– Developing electronic services has begun along with the spreading of Internet usage. Nowadays people want to run their errands outside office hours as well, Saarimäki states.
The Turku Municipal Property Corporation uses an Internet-based service for applying for building permits, with which the applicants are able to fill in the applications on the internet using their own computers, and the building control can both monitor and guide the entire procedure. Applying for building permits on the Internet works 24/7, meaning it is not dependent on date or time.
– At the moment, the service for applying for building permits on the Internet is mainly directed at professional applicants. Professional builders and consultants involved in building development have been profiled as applicants so that they don’t have to visit our office every day.
The application has been in use for about a year, and it has been very popular among the applicants.
– The application becomes more and more user-friendly with time. These are the kinds of services that are here to stay. You can’t really live without them anymore.
The newest eService Turku will introduce is Tekla Feedback, which is an electronic feedback application that is integrated to Tekla Municipality GIS. With the application, residents can send feedback to the city concerning, for example, broken streetlights or potholes that obstruct traffic. The feedback is based on geographic information, and the feedback is recorded directly in the right place in Tekla Municipality GIS. Handling the feedback will also be easier, since the person in charge is able to see all information properties related to the object.
– When we get the feedback, the receiver immediately sees what the situation in reality is and can determine necessary actions at once. The feedback application acts as a sort of extension to our production environment. The key element here is that the feedback is based on geographic information, Saarimäki explains.
– We have great expectations for electronic feedback. Because it is integrated with Tekla Municipality GIS, we don’t see it just as a channel to receive feedback, but more as a tool for administrating all of our assets.
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Saarimäki sees that the development of Internet-based services and applications will continue in the future.
– Interactivity has progressed a lot. With the help of the Internet, there are now things available to the great public that no one could even have dreamt of 20 years ago.
– As for the technical sector, we have pretty much all of our core data in the solutions and there are no longer any binders or paper maps lying on the shelves that would need to be entered in the database. The question now is how to apply the information and how to cross-utilize it better. The city has a lot to develop and utilize in the development of geographic information. In the future, I predict that interface services will be utilized even more efficiently.
Saarimäki hopes that the software solutions will communicate fluently in the future and that there would not be a need to transfer information from one system to another. In this way, the user might not even know which system is providing the information.
– It should be possible to retrieve data directly from each server, and the users of the data could concentrate on their own applications and updating their own data. The data must be original and not a copy of something so that there is no need to wait for updated versions.
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Turku has been involved in several Tekla Solution development projects from the very beginning.
– In the development of Tekla Solution, Tekla has the task of monitoring technological developments and keeping municipalities informed of new possibilities, while we customers provide insight into developmental needs related to the application functions and features from the users’ point of view. Tekla WebMap and the Internet map service are good examples of how these two perspectives have come together in the form of a very useful result, Saarimäki says.
– Functionalities are developed in cooperation with Tekla. When we are involved from the beginning, the project is a shared project and it will succeed. Experiences from cooperating with Tekla have been very good across the board. There is something new going on all the time.
A great portion of new development ideas are born in the management group work. The group consists of representatives from Tekla and its seven customer municipalities. Ilkka Saarimäki is the longest-standing member of the management group and has been one of the key figures in Tekla Solution's development.
– An important by-product of the management group is a closely collaborating network of the users of Tekla Solution. The management group has been the basis for everything. All the major projects have been developed together, and we have been able to share costs. In addition, we have shared many great ideas amongst participants. Together we have created a good software solution for municipalities.
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Photos: City of Turku and Tekla
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