Chisa: From .xls files to a successful SaaS

The Challenge For a period of time, Strømberg & Sahl A/S, the Danish company that invented Chisa, documented all their work in Excel. At a certain stage, their staff started to face a problem: transferring information from one .xls sheet to another was far from comfortable. Building a website that every staff member could access was the natural idea.

The Solution After preparing the prototypes and extracting the data from raw .xls files, we have designed a Ruby on Rails website. The new data management solution boosted the workload and helped in information exchange between the company’s employees. But the best was yet to come: soon it turned out that there was a much wider demand for a system like CHISA Project. Data organization and workload documentation appeared to be the entire Danish building industry’s pain point. In May 2016, John Theisen took it to the next level and quit his CFO job in Strømberg & Sahl A/S to start the software company CHISA A/S. The founding of CHISA A/S meant a significant step forward in our cooperation. To ensure compatibility with external services, we have enabled export and import of all data from and to CHISA. Data from Excel files no longer have to be manually entered into the system. Thanks to the export functionality, data can be easily extracted, modified or archived.

The Outcome With several hundreds active users, functionalities like generating reports and integrations with invoicing systems and the counterpart mobile app, Chisa has come a long road from a mere prototype to a fully-fledged software as a service making work of construction companies easier and more transparent every day.