Proof in practice
How P2 Energi turned business knowledge into software
Every company has processes. Some companies automate them. A few transform them into a competitive advantage.
For years, P2 Energi has continuously evolved their own business platform on Digital Platform. Not through one enormous project, but by improving one capability at a time.
Today their software reflects how their business actually works. Exactly as software should.
Outgrowing the tool
One market stall becoming a workshop, then a warehouse, then a district — the same trade housed in something that finally fits it.
Most software starts with features. This story starts with a business.
P2 Energi had years of experience, specialised workflows and deep domain knowledge. Like many growing companies, some of that knowledge lived inside spreadsheets. Some lived inside documents. Some lived inside experienced employees. Some simply lived inside routines.
They work with commercial properties and with businesses where energy is business-critical — in food retail, a temperature that drifts affects the working environment, the customers and the goods on the shelf. What makes that work possible is understanding how heating, cooling, ventilation and control systems act on each other, not any one of them in isolation.
The software available on the market could support parts of that business. But it could never become the business. So instead of adapting themselves to software, they gradually adapted software to themselves. That journey has now been running for years, and it continues today.
“Many are very good at individual parts. Our strength is that we understand the whole, and how the systems interact. That is where the real efficiency happens.”
When growth turned Excel into a limitation
For many years, large parts of P2 Energi's analysis and follow-up work ran on advanced Excel models. The solution worked well. But the more customers and projects that arrived, the clearer its limits became. Every analysis required manual work: data had to be collected, processed and assembled by hand.
Knowledge and functionality sat, to a large degree, with individual people.
“We had a very skilled colleague who had built up much of the logic in Excel. But as the volumes increased it became clear that continuing to work the same way was not sustainable.”
“If something stopped working, it was often one person who had to solve it.”
Every business starts in spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are fantastic. Until they become your business system.
At some point a growing company reaches a limit. Knowledge becomes fragmented. Processes become inconsistent. Reporting becomes manual. Important decisions depend on specific people remembering specific things.
The problem is not Excel. The problem is that business knowledge has outgrown the tool. That is the moment where business knowledge should begin becoming software.
Outgrowing the tool
One market stall becoming a workshop, then a warehouse, then a district — the same trade housed in something that finally fits it.
A system built out of the real work
Unlike a standard platform, PoP grew out of the business's own needs. The goal was not to digitise for the sake of digitising. The goal was to capture the knowledge that already existed inside the organisation and make it available in a modern tool.
Behind the project lay hundreds of discussions about everything from calculation models to user experience.
“To get everything right we had to make sure that the mathematics, the logic and the visualisation all worked.”
Software should grow exactly like the business
Traditional software projects try to predict everything up front. Real businesses do not work that way. New regulations appear. Customers change. Processes improve. Opportunities emerge.
So the software evolved the same way. One capability. One improvement. One business problem at a time.
Not because the original vision was incomplete. Because successful businesses continuously evolve. Software should too.
Business → Need → Improvement → Business
A single street circling one working district, each lap leaving one more building finished behind it.
Bringing people along
One of the biggest challenges in any digitisation project is creating engagement among the people who will use the thing. Work on PoP has therefore been shaped by close and continuous dialogue with its users, with new capabilities developed step by step and prioritised by actual usefulness rather than by wish list.
After returning from parental leave, Louise gradually took on more responsibility for the system, and eventually became its product owner.
“What is obvious to me is not obvious to anyone else.”
“You get a lot of ideas and requests. So you constantly have to weigh the development effort against the value it creates.”
The platform becomes part of the business
Eventually something changes. People stop talking about “the software”. Instead they simply describe how the company works.
The software becomes invisible. It becomes infrastructure. The platform reflects the business instead of forcing the business into predefined boxes.
That is the goal. Not software. Better business.
“I tend to say that this is my system. I have so many ideas and visions for what it could become.”
More than a digital tool
As AI and automation have become common in the property sector, Louise sees a risk in tools that are excellent at one thing and blind to everything around it — which is the same insight the business itself was built on.
PoP has become the tool that turns large volumes of data into concrete decisions and actions, and that lets P2 Energi scale without giving up quality.
“Many systems optimise a specific function. But they do not always see how the different parts affect each other.”
Small improvements compound
No single improvement transforms a company. A long series of them does.
Each new capability removes friction, reduces manual work, captures more business knowledge, improves visibility — and makes the next improvement easier than the last one was.
Over time those small improvements become a completely different business platform. Exactly like compound interest.
Compounding capability
Identical small buildings added one at a time along a rising street, until the skyline they make is nothing like where it started.
The key is in the collaboration
Asked what the journey has taught her, Louise comes back to the distance between two ways of thinking — and to closing it.
That is perhaps where the core of the PoP story sits. Not in the technology itself, but in the meeting between business knowledge and software development.
“You speak different languages depending on whether you come from the business side or the development side.”
The software now evolves with the business
The journey did not end when version one launched. There was no finish line.
Every new business challenge can become another platform capability. The software grows together with the company — which means the company's advantage keeps growing too.
This is not unique to P2 Energi
The industry is. The pattern is not.
Every company has knowledge worth protecting. Every company has workflows a competitor cannot copy overnight. Every company has experience that deserves better than spreadsheets and disconnected systems.
Digital Platform exists to gradually transform that knowledge into software. Not by replacing your business. By helping your business become software.
One platform, many trades
Seven districts of unmistakably different trades, all standing on one shared grid of streets and utilities.
The original interview
Louise was interviewed in Swedish for digitalplattform.se. Her words appear here in translation, with the original Swedish beneath each quotation.
What could your business become?
Imagine if every improvement your company makes became part of your software. Imagine if every lesson learned stayed inside the business.
Imagine software that continuously becomes more valuable because your company continuously becomes smarter.
That is the journey P2 Energi has been on. And it is the same journey every Digital Platform customer begins.
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