Lillehammer municipality on getting ahead in water and sewerage project delivery

Lillehammer municipality covers an area of 477 km² with more than 28,500 inhabitants. And together with the neighbouring municipalities of Øyer and Gausdal, we’re looking at a total of almost 40,000 inhabitants in the entire Lillehammer region. Their water and sewerage service area is covered by 50 employees across three departments: pipe networks, technical facilities and management/project/development.

The project department alone manages an investment budget of 150–200M a year. Their projects are divided into renovation and new construction of both pipe networks and technical facilities – covering waterworks, water pumping stations, elevated water basins, sewage pumping stations and sewage treatment plants across the region.

Gathering collaboration on a single shared platform

When it comes to project follow-up, Lillehammer municipality recently moved on from a traditional Windows folder structure to a streamlined CDE solution. “In order to achieve our goal to increase efficiency and thus capacity for other tasks, we saw the need to gather cross-disciplinary collaboration in one place,” project manager Thor Anders Johansen says.

“Interaxo gives everyone involved a shared place to work from – one single source of truth. When the whole team is loyal to the same system, doing all registrations, updates and follow-ups there, our overview becomes so much clearer. Including responsibilities, with assigned roles and deadlines for every action point.”
– Thor Anders Johansen, Project Manager at Lillehammer municipality

Thor Anders credits Interaxo for his improved overview and sense of control as a project manager:

• Finding the information he needs is straightforward, thanks to simple filtering and search functionality.
• Fragmented communication across multiple channels is a thing of the past. Everything now flows through one system.
• Meeting summaries are generated automatically, with reports directly linked to action points.
• All task information and comments are logged in one place, with a well-established flow for follow-up.
• Technical clarifications no longer live in separate folders. They’ve been replaced by action points in the system.

“Tribia’s advisors have been invaluable in getting us up and running with Interaxo. Two highly informative workshops gave us a strong start, and their quick, thorough responses to our questions – as well as their ability to understand and clarify our needs – have been greatly appreciated. Along the way, we’ve had several user meetings to ensure good working practices. I think that was crucial to getting the most out of the solution,” Thor Anders shares.

Water and wastewater project Lillehammer municipality. Photo: Lillehammer municipality

Digitalising water and wastewater management

“Digitalisation in the water and wastewater sector is moving fast. We’ve shifted largely to cloud-based solutions for digital follow-up of our facilities, and Lillehammer municipality wants to be at the forefront of that development. Our next step is exploring model-based project delivery,” Thor Anders shares. When asked about his long-term objectives, he concludes: “Beyond becoming more efficient and reducing costs, we expect higher-quality project execution overall. Interaxo has significantly reduced our risk exposure.”