With only 1,800 residents, Estremera, located around 40 miles southeast of Madrid, is one of the smallest and most remote members of the Infracontrol Community. During the fall, and as the first municipality in Spain, they decided to connect to Infracontrol Online to streamline work within their technical administration. Even though it’s a small community way out in the Spanish countryside, it has the same needs and high ambitions as every other municipality when it comes to streamlining service and assuring its quality to residents.
Jose Carlos Villalvilla López, Estremera municipality’s mayor, can see a distinct benefit with the Swedish cloud service:
“Growing communities lead to increasing demands for accessibility and durability. It’s why we’re extremely pleased here at Estremera municipality with our collaboration with Infracontrol and being able to use their cloud service, Infracontrol Online. EstremeraApp and the cloud service provided by Infracontrol mean that our residents can participate more in the administration of assets and resources in our municipality. It gives us the ability to monitor a more intelligent infrastructure that simplifies and improves day-to-day life for our residents.”
A country with great potential
Spain is a large country with just over 46 million inhabitants spread across 8,000 municipalities. Many of them are extremely small, but there are a number of municipalities with many residents such as Madrid (3.2 million), Barcelona (1.6 million), Valencia (815,000), Seville (700,000) and Zaragoza (675,000).
As part of the international launch of Infracontrol Online following the successes in neighboring Portugal, a subsidiary and local office were established in Madrid back in 2016.
“We saw that Spain has the same need to improve control and streamline technical administration as do Swedish and Portuguese municipalities,” says Johan Höglund, Infracontrol CEO.
Good references are the key to the market
But Johan Höglund says that even though the need exists, getting started with the first customers is always a challenge.
“It’s taken time, but after much methodical work and many meetings we’ve gotten started with the first reference municipality, Estremera.”
He tells us that there are additional communities preparing to join, and that these initial reference customers are incredibly important for the ability to progress and benefit from the great potential the country offers.
“The first question I get naturally asks which other municipalities use the service. And even though we have just over 140 satisfied customers in Sweden and Portugal, domestic references naturally have much more weight.”
Simpler, better functioning everyday lives
Needs do not differ much no matter the municipality people happen to be in. Spain’s inhabitants run across the same disruptions in everyday life as people in Sweden, according to Martinho Goncalves, who was in charge of configuring and commissioning Infracontrol Online in Estremera:
“It is mainly about cases in garbage collection, water supply and sewage, streets and parks. Residents see and report shortcomings or submit suggestions for improvements in these areas via the app or by contacting the municipality, which has full control over all current cases and ensures that they are taken care of.”
Following training of municipal personnel and publication of the app for fault reports, they have now begun using the service.
“Previously we did everything by hand, but now we have fast, efficient support for our day-to-day work,” says Martinho Goncalves. “We have better, clearer information from residents and thus a better ability to remedy the faults detected. And because everything is documented, we have great supporting data for deciding on various improvement measures.”
