The municipality of Wadgassen had been thinking digitally and in line with the times and is looking for ways to make its administration smarter at the beginning of 2020. The goal: effective management and decision-making through the intelligent use of data. The main challenge was to bring together and process data from the different sources and data silos existing in specialised procedures.

In order to implement the project, data from different sources and specialised procedures had to be extracted, blended and processed. The appropriate software for this was missing. Staff members spent hours on the time-consuming process of blending and preparing the different data formats. Important tasks such as day care planning suffered. External factors such as COVID-19 or refugee movements can only be included in forecasts with great effort and expertise.

In view of the challenges, Wadgassen, together with three other municipalities from the Saarland, approaches the responsible IT service provider eGo-Saar to acquire the Polyteia Solution Demography. The pilot project kicks off in autumn 2020 with four municipalities.

Polyteia integrates the population registration data from the VOIS MESO application into the Leto data platform via a connector. The data is automatically transformed and prepared as a demographic solution. Internal decision templates and reports are easily retrievable and exportable.

With the solution, users in Wadgassen have access to daily updated and easy-to-understand analyses of population development (e.g. influx, births, age structure). Data in the required format is available at any time for daycare centre or school planning. The possibility of connecting further specialised applications or data sources also allows other important variables to be taken into account. For example, the number of Ukrainian refugees can be taken into account in the analysis.

The Demography solution includes visualisations of historical developments and analyses, but also allows for small-scale forecasts. The administration can export reports directly and present them to the council to justify decision-making projects. For example, Wadgassen has set the waiting list for daycare places to zero by 2022 with the help of intuitive forecasts.

The pandemic and the war of aggression have once again proven how agile and flexibly politics and administration must react – ideally basing decisions on sound data. Polyteia mapped the development of refugee numbers for Wadgassen. The administration could thus continue to make decisions based on realistic and contextualised data.

The four pilot municipalities have successfully tested the solution. In mid-2022, the IT service provider of the Saarland, eGo-Saar, gave the go-ahead for a state-wide roll-out. The solution is now available to the 58 municipal administrations and state authorities in Saarland.