Customer Stories
Veidekke Sweden takes on Stockholm’s largest environmental project with Hoylu
Veidekke ASA
est. 1936
Oslo, Norway
Norway’s largest construction and civil engineering company
Hoylu Value
Reduced time spent in planning, plan analysis, and meetings
Simplified visualization of a highly complex, tunnel-based project
Increased team involvement in planning and communication
Enhanced information-sharing and plan precision
Veidekke ASA is a Scandinavian contractor and infrastructure firm specializing in roads, tunnels, bridges, and housing. Founded in Norway in 1936 as a cobblestone cutting and laying business, Veidekke has grown into an organization of over 8,000 people, spread across four business areas; Construction, Civil Engineering and Infrastructure, Asphalt, and Environmental Work. With a strong focus on sustainability, Veidekke strives to deliver performance with meaning.
Introduction
The Sickla wastewater treatment facility, part of the Henriksdal wastewater treatment plant, is located beneath the Hammarbybacken ski slope in Stockholm. Sickla is undergoing a major expansion, and a new sewage tunnel is being constructed from the Bromma wastewater treatment plant to the Sickla site. Once this is completed, the Bromma plant will be decommissioned.
The Henriksdal plant is also being upgraded with advanced purification and membrane technologies. This includes new biological treatment systems, positioning it as one of the largest wastewater facilities globally to utilize membrane filtration.
This project is Stockholm’s largest environmental investment, with Stockholm Water and Waste investing over 9 billion SEK to ensure that the growing city has an environmentally optimized facility with reduced phosphorus and nitrogen emissions to provide clean water and keep waste and microplastics out of the Baltic Sea. Veidekke has been involved in the project since March 2023, with completion slated for summer of 2028.
Challenge
This massive infrastructure project is located inside the Hammarbybacken mountain. Made up of rows of cavernous tunnels, the project requires stringent planning. Work must be completed in small, dark, enclosed spaces, and closely coordinated to ensure safety. Due to the enclosed nature of the tunnels, there is no space to store excess materials, so deliveries and materials logistics require careful pre-planning.
With a projected duration of over five years, the project’s planning must be extremely precise, as any planning conflicts early on could lead to significant delays. “If we lose one hour, then we have a problem with it in the future. It will accumulate, and then it can be one year,” explains Irena Klingorova, senior project specialist at Veidekke. Frustrated by the time the team was spending on Excel-based planning and its lack of flexibility, Klingorova began searching for a solution to enable her team to plan faster and more flexibly incorporate everyone involved in production.
Solution
When Klingorova was introduced to Hoylu, she quickly saw the platform’s potential to reduce the administrative burden of managing plans in Excel. Veidekke has a standard process called “Rullandeplanering”, or short-interval planning, which is typically conducted in Excel. But the sheer size of the Sickla project rendered normal methods of planning and analysis unworkable. “It’s like five normal-sized buildings in one,” says Klingorova.
Seeing the potential to plan more efficiently, the team implemented Hoylu and soon saw improvements. “It’s a better-used Excel. You can follow up about things a lot easier with this one,” explains Niklas Nyström, groundwork construction manager. The team appreciated the configurability of Hoylu, which enabled them to start off simply but progressively enrich their planning by layering on additional functionality. “You can go more advanced if you’d like to, but just to use it daily, it’s quite easy,” says Nyström.
The planners save significant time in plan analysis, due to Hoylu’s automatically calculated metrics like percent plan complete (PPC) and variance reasons. “It’s more easily overviewed, and you can get everything in the planning in an easier way than you did with Excel,” says Nyström. Hoylu has also enabled many people to plan simultaneously, reducing meeting time. “This program affects the whole management in a better way,” adds Klingorova.
Results
Klingorova was impressed by how quickly Hoylu was adopted within the team due to its ease-of-use and intuitive interface. Initially concerned that more senior employees might not gravitate towards a new digital planning tool, Klingorova was pleasantly surprised. “I was worried about this group most, but I have to say that these people liked and still like Hoylu quite a lot, and have no problem with it,” she explains. The team has found Hoylu to be a good complement for other systems they utilize, such as Power Project, and has been easily integrated into their existing tech stack.
The team’s engagement in the planning process has also improved. “The probability that the team goes in this program is higher than that they would work in Excel. This is more interesting, more attractive for them. It’s more visual, that’s why it’s so easy for everybody,” Klingorova observes.
Information sharing in the field has also been enhanced. “If you ask people out in production, they always argue that they don’t get as much information as they would like to. But here, you can put in the information and it’s open for everyone. So it’s a good way to communicate,” says Nyström.
The team’s experience has been so positive that Klingorova frequently recommends Hoylu to other projects at Veidekke. She understands the hesitation to test a new solution while under time pressure but is convinced that the effort pays off. “It was quite intensive to start with, I was at every meeting and helped, but it worked,” she says.
About Hoylu
Our platform offers you and your team the power of unified planning with an intuitive solution that combines feature-rich whiteboarding, planning, and task management. Plan, engage, and visualize your projects with best-in-class usability and integrations. Bring your best ideas together with your best data across disparate teams and solutions for unified, unlimited, unbeatable construction project planning.