VME grew revenue 30% with the same headcount — construction process digitalization with Gluu

The problem with paper on construction sites

Construction process digitalization starts by understanding exactly where paper creates risk. For VME, that analysis revealed two distinct pressure points.

The first was coordination. In the construction industry, the number of interfaces between roles is high — between project managers, foremen, and field workers, between the builder’s instructions and the tasks assigned to specific crews. At VME, this coordination was manual. The foreman held the overview. When a builder changed an assignment, the update traveled by phone or paper — and field workers sometimes drove to jobs already completed by a previous shift. Each error was small in isolation. Accumulated across a growing project portfolio, they added up.

The second was documentation. The district heating department in particular involved many small tasks, each of which required records — what was done, when, where, and by whom. Collecting this from hourly-paid workers who were moving between sites was close to impossible in practice. Several attempts at photo documentation had been tried. None had become consistent. Without reliable records, quality management could only be reactive.

Both challenges had the same underlying structure: the information needed to coordinate and verify work existed, but it lived in too many places — on paper, in people’s heads, in separate systems. As VME’s project portfolio grew, that structure became more fragile, not less.

Mapping the value chain with Bülow Management

In 2018, VME brought in Bülow Management A/S to address both challenges together. Bülow Management is a Danish management consultancy that helps companies build effective coherence between strategy, management, employees, processes, and results — with particular depth in the construction sector. For VME, Bülow’s role was to structure and lead the process mapping work before any platform decisions were made.

Together, VME’s key employees and Bülow mapped the company’s full value chain from end to end. The focus was straightforward: find where paper registrations and communications between production and administration were generating the most friction, and rebuild those interfaces as digitalized processes in Gluu.

The implementation started with a pilot project. This was a deliberate choice. Rather than rolling out across the business immediately, VME and Bülow scoped the pilot to the highest-friction areas — the processes with the most paper, the most manual coordination, and the most risk. The pilot showed clear returns, which made the case for continuing. VME then extended the rollout to the rest of the district heating department, and from there to the construction department.

Change management was built into the approach from the start. Hourly-paid workers — many of them not digital natives — needed a reason to change how they worked. The answer was not to add a new system on top of existing ones, but to replace the existing tangle with something simpler. With Gluu, several separate systems and email exchanges were reduced to a few taps in one app. IT complexity went down, not up.

During the pilot, VME also established an internal group of super users and ambassadors — workers who had experienced the change firsthand and could speak to it from personal experience. These ambassadors supported the wider rollout with practical reassurance that no external consultant could provide.

Getting construction process digitalization to stick in the field means building it around the people who do the work — not just around the processes. If you want to see how Gluu supports that kind of rollout in practice, the free trial is a good starting point.

What VME gained from construction process digitalization

The headline result is the 30% revenue increase with the same headcount. But the operational picture behind that number is equally telling.

Documentation is now automatic. When a worker completes a task in Gluu, time and place are logged immediately. Workers typically add photos and fill in any required fields using Gluu’s forms — a few taps in the same app, with no separate documentation step. For tasks such as road closures or excavations, this creates a verifiable record without any extra effort. The documentation that was previously close to impossible to collect now happens as part of doing the work.

Project managers have a different working day. Gluu’s case management view gives them a real-time overview of every active project — who has done what, and when — without contacting individual team members. The continuous status-checking that used to consume time is gone. A manager can see at a glance whether a project is on track.

VME also uses Gluu’s SharePoint integration to unify task, case, and document management in a single workflow. Rather than moving between systems to find project documents, workers and managers have everything in one place — the same process that governs the task also holds the relevant files.

“With Gluu we have been able to bring knowledge from the builder all the way to the man with the shovel. We have achieved a comprehensive overview and an ability to control our workflows, so that we can always be at the forefront of our planning.”

Kim Larsen
CEO, VME A/S

Beyond the specific improvements, the Gluu implementation changed the nature of VME’s management system. The processes are not static. VME adjusts work instructions continuously — new learnings from each project are incorporated directly, and those updates reach every team member automatically. The rollout in the district heating and construction departments is now complete; the administration department is next.

In brief