customers & cases

search-as-a-service

Västra Götalandsregionen (VGR) is the second largest health care organization in Sweden with 50,000 employees and a 42 billon SEK turn over. VGR has a complex IT-architecture with several content management systems, this partly due to a merge of health care organisations in the west of Sweden. This means users often have to navigate different information sources to find what they are looking for. To resolve this problem a search engine had been installed and setup. However, the lack of functionality for filtering search results made it hard for users to drill down in the often very large result set. VGR also wanted to cut license costs and be able to share their investments in development with other health care organizations throughout Sweden.

In order to meet requirements, Findwise designed and developed a Findability solution built on the open source search engine Apache Solr. Apache Solr provided excellent scalability and flexibility, which was a perfect fit to VGR’s heterogeneous environment with many users. Since Solr is very capable at its core but limited in functionality much was developed and added including; search interface, information refinement framework, search statistics gathering and various connectors for connecting to data sources. The findability solution replaced a commercial search platform with a lower cost than two years’ worth of support fees of the previous platform. At the same time usability, functionality and performance have been improved. Users find what they are looking for faster and easier! User response has been very positive and the solution has been received as a great improvement in Findability.