City of Hagen: Transforming municipal budget planning and analytics with a modern, dynamic, and collaborative approach
Simplifying budget planning and controlling with SAP
The City of Hagen provides almost 200,000 residents with a broad range of municipal services that impact almost every area of their lives. With a tight communal budget, the city wanted to increase planning efficiency. By moving to SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, the City can make more data-driven decisions at all levels with near real-time insight into financial performance.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Government | Hagen, Germany | 3,500 employees | Sopra Steria and bi excellence software GmbH |
Of custom code eliminated with a clean core strategy
Faster planning evaluation, from 2 days down to a few hours
Processes and eliminates redundant manual tasks
Technical Project Manager and Systems Architect, City of Hagen
Simplifying municipal budget planning
With a population of almost 200,000 people, the City of Hagen in Germany is widely known for hosting the country’s only state distance-learning university with almost 70,000 students. Beyond being a pioneer in education and a logistics hub in the middle of Germany, the City of Hagen is an independent city, whose municipal administration is responsible for all aspects of public life.
At a time of tight public budgets, efficient planning and prudent use of resources is essential to keep the city running. In every area from general citizen services to childcare and the city’s theater, the City of Hagen is responsible for managing an annual budget of nearly €1 billion.
Ilona Walter, Project Lead SAP S/4HANA Migration and SAP Analytics Cloud at the City of Hagen, says: “Over the years, our municipal budget planning had become too complex. Our capital spending plans became difficult to understand. We also risked getting into a situation where very few people knew the delicate details of internal processes, which could cause issues in the future. We wanted to clean this up and create a simpler, more standardized solution that would be easy to use for all stakeholders, from department managers and controllers to political decision-makers.”
With its goal to develop a more effective and straightforward budget structure, the City of Hagen began looking for solutions that could leverage its newly implemented SAP S/4HANA suite to deliver a modern, collaborative, and future-proof budget planning system.
Technical Project Manager and Systems Architect, City of Hagen
Seizing an opportunity for complete modernization
While evaluating options to streamline its budget planning, the City of Hagen embarked on an ambitious migration to SAP S/4HANA. By leaving 20 years of legacy IT and decisions behind, the municipal administration aimed to establish a new foundation for its financial management processes focused solely on the city’s real needs. The City of Hagen worked closely with implementation partner Sopra Steria to successfully complete the production cut-over migration over three months.
Ilona Walter remembers: “By modernizing our finance application with a fresh approach as a greenfield project using SAP S/4HANA, we had the freedom to change things for the better. We were able to incorporate feedback and insights from staff to design new, more efficient data structures and processes.”
After experimentation with various tools and solutions, the City of Hagen decided to move to SAP Analytics Cloud for planning to manage its annual budget. Matthias Müller, Technical Project Manager and Systems Architect at the City of Hagen, explains: “SAP Analytics Cloud for planning allowed us to follow an architectural principle of loose coupling. This would improve reliability and flexibility while offering fast and easy integration with SAP S/4HANA.”
For the implementation of SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, the City of Hagen followed an iterative approach with fast feedback loops. “During the implementation, but especially also when starting to use the solution, I wanted to establish the idea that budget planning is not a one-off activity – it’s a continuous process,” says Marco Hasken, Head of SAP Software and Service at the City of Hagen. “The solution needed to reflect that by providing dynamic insights to compare planning data with actual figures, allowing for more agile controlling and forward-looking decision-making.”
The City of Hagen relies on SAP Business Warehouse powered by SAP HANA as its central data platform, with SAP Analytics Cloud supporting advanced analytics across the entire budget and enabling quick comparisons with the actual financial performance of the administration.
Head of SAP Software and Service, City of Hagen
Leveraging modern solutions to save time and boost productivity
Using SAP solutions, the City of Hagen has achieved its goal of providing budget planners with easier workflows, a better overview and more flexible reporting. “Staff who work with budgets can now create new reports quickly without external help,” says Ilona Walter. “All our key stakeholders have responded positively to the changes, and we’re excited to see how the new processes will impact capital spending decisions – and ultimately quality of life for residents.”
The City of Hagen followed a “clean core” strategy, helping the organization to eliminate complex legacy code from its SAP environment, which enables easier, more efficient integration of data and processes.
For example, in the past, the budget planning process executed several complex and slow calculations, even when they were not really helpful for the task at hand. Moreover, some of the preparatory work to collect and compile data and reports took weeks. Many of these manual tasks are no longer necessary now. “I remember one planning evaluation always took us two days to complete,” explains Matthias Müller. “Now, we can do it in just a few hours.”
Like most public institutions, the City of Hagen is legally required to publish its budget in written form to ensure transparency and accountability. When the budgeting process is complete, the City must extract the information into a high-quality PDF report, formatted to comply with the legally prescribed structure. To generate this report, the administration deployed biExport for SAP Analytics Cloud by bi excellence software GmbH, a specialized solution that supports advanced templates and automation to make reporting in various formats faster and easier. “Creating the capital spending plan used to take two days,” remembers Matthias Müller. “It was a very complex workflow with up to eight PCs working in parallel, pulling data and generating 120 partial plans, 17 information areas, and adding hundreds of text blocks across thousands of pages. It took a lot of skill and manual labor for this brittle process chain to complete the task without any errors.”
Marco Hasken emphasizes: “Today, every user can generate a PDF of the capital spending plan themselves without having to rely on the technical SAP Competence Center (CCC), and it is 24x faster, only taking about two hours to complete. We’re proud that as far as I know, we are one of the first municipal administration in Germany that has implemented an integrated modern budget planning and reporting solution with SAP S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud for planning.”
Head of SAP Software and Service, City of Hagen
Making planning more collaborative and dynamic
The City of Hagen has established a stable foundation that offers many new capabilities for municipal budget planners to make well-informed, data-driven decisions. “It’s easier now for planners to understand the bigger picture,” says Ilona Walter. “Using scenario planning, they can explore alternative options much faster and gain a more intuitive understanding of cost drivers and dependencies.”
Looking forward, the administration wants to modernize more processes using SAP Business Technology Platform and SAP Fiori apps. By using state-of-the-art industry-standard solutions, the City of Hagen will make it easier to onboard new specialists from other industries, helping it to manage recruitment challenges.
Overall, the City of Hagen now provides planners and decision-makers with more advanced tools to analyze budgets. New forecasting features enable them to become more proactive during budget discussions. Marco Hasken concludes: “Today, our budget is an active management tool with up-to-date information and integrated controlling reports.”
Featured partners
Sopra Steria, an SAP Gold Partner, is a leading global technology company with 56,000 employees in 30 countries. The company delivers digital transformation projects around the world with a focus on consulting and digital services.
bi excellence software GmbH, an SAP Silver Partner, is an experienced add-on developer specializing in data export and report generation solutions for SAP applications. The company’s biExport for SAP Analytics Cloud offering supports a wide range of export formats to enable complex publishing workflows.