The Challenge: 1,000 binders and digital chaos
Stavanger Municipality manages a massive portfolio of 800 purpose-built buildings covering 800,000 square meters, including schools, nursing homes, and sports facilities. When they chose a new property management system, they faced a monumental task: digitising and sorting mountains of legacy documentation.
“We had over a thousand binders of documentation, in addition to documentation stored on CDs, USB drives, and various servers… The catalog structure became very large, and many stored the same document in different places.”
— Espen Svendsen, Head of Purpose-Built Buildings
This lack of organisation had real operational costs. Operational staff needed everything from color codes to structural load calculations for installing solar panels. Without accessible documentation, the municipality often had to hire consultants for expensive inspections and new calculations.
The Solution: Automated sorting with AI
After a public tender process, Stavanger Municipality partnered with Findable. The AI-powered solution now automatically accesses unsorted documents, checks for duplicates, and sorts them into the correct subject folders in the facility management system.
“Now the service has access to unsorted documents, unpacks them, checks for duplication, and sorts them into the right place,” says Richard Roaldsøy, ITB coordinator. “It’s hard to say how much time this has saved us, but with approximately 40,000 documents, it’s a significant number of hours.”
The Future: Digital Twins & Smart Glasses
With the documentation now sorted and quality-assured, Stavanger Municipality is looking towards advanced applications like digital twins.
“Since the facility management documentation is now sorted… we can link it to digital twins of the buildings. This allows operational staff to access documentation through smart glasses or tablets on-site. If you are looking at, or are near, a technical installation, you will receive maintenance instructions, technical drawings, and other documentation.”
— Richard Roaldsøy, ITB Coordinator
The transformation from physical binders to AI-powered digital twins represents a complete modernization of how Stavanger Municipality manages its extensive building portfolio.