State Capital Saarbrücken: Streamlining budget planning processes in the cloud
Improved process continuity and efficient collaboration with SAP
With over 180,000 residents, Saarbrücken is the Saarland region’s economic center, renowned for its culture and hospitality. SAP solutions are helping the Saarbrücken municipal government make the best use of its annual budget of €591 million to improve sustainability and build a truly Smart City with modern infrastructure and digital citizen services.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Government | Saarbrücken, Germany | 2,700 employees | kape-it GmbH |
Usability and efficiency with standardized user experience
Business users collaborate more productively across departments
Validation increases data quality and eliminates user errors
Head of Department and SAP Project Lead, State Capital Saarbrücken
Reducing complexity and simplifying budget planning
At the municipal administration in Saarbrücken, annual budget planning is a highly decentralized process involving over 30 business units. The city wanted to increase planning and budgeting efficiency, and to simplify collaboration between all stakeholders in each business unit and the central planning office.
A key challenge was the fragmented user experience. To complete various planning and reporting tasks, employees needed to use many user interfaces which all worked differently. Staff had to memorize detailed steps and the right sequence for every action. Furthermore, adding and updating planning records in bulk could only be done by the small central team. An objective was to enable decentralized planners to handle a very large volume of bulk changes at once independently to speed up the process and increase efficiency for everyone involved.
Planning and Controlling Specialist, State Capital Saarbrücken
Co-innovation in the cloud
Saarbrücken embarked on a major transformation initiative to modernize its processes by moving its core ERP systems to SAP S/4HANA, and the finance team realized that the new technology platform offered opportunities to improve its budget planning. After the team saw a demo of SAP Analytics Cloud for planning at a user group meeting, they understood the impact this new solution could have on their productivity and decided to engage with SAP to customize the application and develop a new budget control system.
Working closely together with SAP and certified SAP Build Partner kape-it GmbH, Saarbrücken created a proof-of-concept solution designed from the ground up to streamline municipal budgeting workflows. The joint project team made quick progress using an agile approach with weekly updates and continuous user feedback.
With a goal of staying closely aligned with industry best practices and platform standards, Saarbrücken combined its extensive in-house SAP expertise with expert guidance from SAP and kape-it GmbH to speed up the process. Claudia Dima, SAP Support at State Capital Saarbrücken, says: “Our co-innovation journey with SAP and kape-it GmbH was a great experience. Whenever we had questions or needed to solve technical challenges, we could quickly talk to the right people and receive rapid responses to continue building a simple yet powerful solution.”
Head of Department and SAP Project Lead, State Capital Saarbrücken
Increasing efficiency and data quality
With SAP Analytics Cloud for planning, Saarbrücken benefits from simpler planning processes and improved productivity. Kerstin Lanz, Head of Department and SAP Project Lead at State Capital Saarbrücken, says: “In the past, we compiled a long, detailed checklist to make sure we make all the data input and changes in the right order across three or four different forms and systems to avoid any problems. With SAP Analytics Cloud, we have a single, unified, and intuitive app with a clean and simple navigation menu that makes the entire workflow straightforward and secure.”
Focusing on governance and compliance, Saarbrücken built a role-based access configuration which ensures that each of its 150 users can only see the information and actions that are relevant for their job.
The streamlined process design makes any changes transparent, with an integrated audit trail to document key decisions. The new process no longer relies on unstructured emails and phone calls – it provides end-to-end workflows that accelerate collaboration across teams and departments, supporting Saarbrücken’s decentralized approach to planning.
A big advantage of the integrated planning app is the improved data quality it provides. Marc Schwarz, Planning & Controlling Specialist at State Capital Saarbrücken, says: “In the past, we had to validate and clean data manually which was a lot of work. Now, we have started with a set of multiple validation rules. Every budget data point gets automatically checked and analyzed to ensure data consistency and avoid user errors. With these new guardrails in place, it is almost impossible for our users to make mistakes that need to be resolved manually.”
During a short training workshop by SAP, the team at Saarbrücken quickly learned how to adapt the solution. Using SAP Analytics Cloud, Saarbrücken can build captivating data stories and sophisticated dashboards or reports with data visualizations easily, without the need to write complex code. “It is very easy to get started, we can now generate new real-time insights flexibly within minutes using built-in data tiles and charts complete with dynamic drill-down features,” confirms Kerstin Lanz. “Building the same report would have taken us hours before – we had to copy data from our system into external tools, which made the process difficult and time-consuming.”
Head of Department and SAP Project Lead, State Capital Saarbrücken
Looking ahead and pushing the boundaries
Following the successful launch of its new budget planning process, Saarbrücken learned that many other municipalities with similar challenges are also interested in the solution.
Meanwhile, the team at Saarbrücken already plans to move ahead with even more ambitious initiatives. “We’re starting to create comprehensive management dashboards for all departments to supercharge data-driven decisions and support our objective of further advancing digitalization,” says Kerstin Lanz. “Our goal is to use SAP Analytics Cloud to enable leaders in the public municipal administration and other top executives to get a complete overview not only over budgets and financials, but also other key metrics that are relevant to make forward-looking decisions.”
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Featured partner
kape-it GmbH is a certified SAP Build Partner with over 20 years of experience with SAP software, specializing in SAP S/4HANA Public Sector Planning solutions. Teaming up with SAP and using the value prototyping infrastructure service, kape-it GmbH is developing innovative solutions by building prototypes and templates based on complex customer requirements to create future-proof applications for tomorrow.