YIT.

YIT is the largest construction company in Finland, with operations in 11 countries throughout Europe. The company specializes in building apartment buildings and office spaces, with over 1,000 housing complexes in their portfolio. To offer a great experience to their customers, they needed a way to distribute relevant news articles and offer services such as apartment cleaning, car sharing, and food delivery to more than 10,000 residents living in their housing communities.

The challenge of delivering a customer portal

The YIT team knew they had the technical expertise to deliver this customer portal, but also realized their existing content management solution would impose development challenges due to years of customizations that limited its flexibility. The team had also adopted a microservices approach in recent years, transforming the majority of their systems into separate services that would provide key functionality for this project. Any content management solution they chose would need to integrate seamlessly with these existing services.

Additionally, with 10,000 registered users living in housing facilities across Europe, YIT needed a way to target specific audiences for localized content and services. This solution would need to be easy to use, as content would come from a variety of sources including non-technical property managers who share information specific to their facilities.

Designing a best-of-breed microservices architecture

YIT chose Kontent.ai for the development and delivery of content for this portal. The solution enables dozens of non-technical property managers to publish articles and announcements specific to their housing complex. The team replicated their geographic footprint within Kontent.ai’s taxonomy model so that content can be distributed based on entire cities and districts, with the possibility of targeting specific apartments in the future.

The Kontent.ai APIs fit seamlessly into YIT’s existing ecosystem of microservices, allowing for rapid integration and development of new content into the portal. This approach allows new articles to display alongside older information being pulled from their legacy content repository, without degrading the end-user experience.

Now serving more than 10,000 residents

It’s now easy for residents in YIT communities to stay informed about local activities and announcements related to their apartments. The YIT team has a portal they can expand to facilities throughout Europe and a new business model that connects hundreds of local service providers to over 10,000 potential customers. As they roll this portal out to additional locations and open it up to more service providers, it will no doubt serve as an attractive differentiator for potential customers and ultimately provide additional revenue to the business.

“Adopting a modern technology stack that includes Kontent.ai allowed us to save more than a half on the total cost of ownership. ​Being a cloud-based, headless content management system, Kontent.ai no longer requires excessive maintenance and allows our resources to be used where it matters. Plus, Kontent.ai’s support is incredibly responsive and efficient, quickly removing any blockers that come up," said Andrey Rudenko, Service Manager, YIT Oyj.