Online permit and control service benefits the builder

“From the developer’s point of view, the main benefit of the municipal online service system is that it gathers nearly all of the building permit-related material in a single location. As new parties join the project, permit-related matters can all be handled collectively,” says Project Director Pirkka Pikkarainen of NCC.

“The system also makes the operations more transparent. All logins and entries stay in the system, and discussions can be retrieved later if necessary,” Pikkarainen says.

It has not always been this easy. The architects remember how things were done before the service went online. “You had to book an appointment at customer service and bring along stacks of drawings to present to the authority. And before that, the stack of paper had to be approved by various agencies. The documents and the information in them was dug up from the archive files when need be,” Leena Brooke says.

The idea of the electronic service is for all the project parties to be able to operate in a shared work space in real time. This means Brooke and Ryhänen no longer need to hop in their car regarding the building permit process. They can transfer the drawings and documents to the control department with a push of a button on their computers.

While digitalization reduces the need to visit the authorities physically, the requirements for construction projects have increased. If you used to need five reports to obtain a building permit, you now need fifteen. For a developer, the higher level of requirements and the efficiency and transparency offered by digitalization create an excellent basis to meet the current quality standards of the industry.