Templates in times of Covid

When the covid pandemic wreak havoc in the begining of 2020, many businesses had to make quick changes to adapt to the new situation.

Lansförsäkringar (LF) is a Swedish group of customer owned insurance companies. Under a normal situation they would welcome customers to visit their offices to meet them in person, however due to the new covid situation they could no longer offer an open office where anybody could just walk in and make an appointment or talk to a representative. Furthermore, opening times and booking times were also changing frequently, making it tedious to keep this information updated on their storefront windows.

The solution to this new reality was to use "Digital Signage" with custom templates and a custom integration to fetch the data automatically. Our Swedish partner, Tylöprint, provided their beautiful panels to hang them on the front of their 10 offices in the area of Gothenburg (Sweden second largest city).

In order to keep the information updated, we had to implement a "web scraping" solution that fetched the data from the different offices' webpages. Since LF were using a CMS that kept the information well structured, we could easily fetch the data several times per hour and by doing so keep the displays showing the latest opening hours as well as other relevant information.

Both the customers and our team are pretty pleased with the result, and the solution has been running for over a year now with almost no human intervention, which was the most important goal to achieve in this project.