The form is online. Behind the counter, a person still reads the PDF, re-types it into a second system, writes to the applicant for the document they forgot, and moves the file on by email. That is where the weeks go, and no amount of further front-end digitalisation touches it.
We build the half nobody built: the automation, the routing between departments, and the drafted decision, on the city's own infrastructure, with the durations measured before we start and published every month after.
It is the number of hours a trained caseworker can spend on a file, and how many of those hours go to work that does not need the training. A second web portal does not create a single additional hour.
And the hours are not going to be bought. Public administration in Germany is losing more people to retirement than it can recruit, in a labour market where it is not the highest bidder. The capacity has to come out of the process, because it is not coming out of the payroll.
Nothing above requires replacing a Fachverfahren, migrating a database, or asking a department to work differently on day one.
ADDITIVE · NOT RIP-AND-REPLACEEach one stands alone and pays for itself alone. Together they are the operating layer a city administration has never had, sitting above the systems it already runs.
The submission is validated against the requirements that actually apply to that case, not a generic checklist, at the moment it is made. The single largest source of delay in German administration is the incomplete file, and it is fixed cheaply at the front and expensively everywhere else.
VOLLSTÄNDIGKEITSPRÜFUNG BEI EINGANGPlans, contracts, certificates, registry extracts, scanned forms, all read and turned into the fields the specialist system expects, with the source page cited next to every extracted value so the caseworker verifies in seconds.
Re-keying is the purest waste in the building. It is skilled staff doing data entry, and it is where transcription errors enter the record.
DOKUMENTENERFASSUNG · FACHVERFAHREN-ANBINDUNGA file that touches Bauordnung, Brandschutz, Denkmalschutz, Umwelt and Mobilität currently exists as five queues and a mailbox. We put one case, one status and one owner above them: every review requested in parallel, each with its own clock, escalating by itself when it runs over.
The departments keep their own systems. What changes is that someone, including the applicant, can finally answer “where does this stand” without making a phone call.
REFERATSÜBERGREIFENDE VORGANGSSTEUERUNGThe Bescheid comes back written from the file: findings, reasoning, conditions, each one carrying the paragraph it rests on and the document that evidences it. Where the law leaves discretion, the system says so and stops, rather than inventing a judgement.
This is the same architecture we use for institutional decision-making elsewhere: a claim without a traceable origin cannot reach the page. In an administration it is not a nicety. It is what makes the document survive a Widerspruch.
BESCHEIDENTWURF MIT RECHTSGRUNDLAGENot a smart-city dashboard. Where every case is, which queue grew this week, which step is the constraint, and which of them is now the reason a duration target is being missed, for the person who has to allocate people on Monday morning.
STEUERUNGSSICHT FÜR DIE AMTSLEITUNGThe city has already decided this question, a few thousand times. Today that precedent lives in folder structures and in the heads of people who are retiring. We make it searchable by the substance of the case, so decisions stay consistent and a new colleague is productive in weeks rather than years.
PRÄZEDENZ- UND WISSENSSPEICHERNo proposal that did would survive a works council, a personnel committee, or a council session, and rightly so. The proposition is the opposite one: the staff you already have, spending their hours on the part of the job that actually requires them.
Take an hour on a typical case and ask what it is spent on.
The alternative to automating the first four lines is not the status quo. It is the same queues, staffed by fewer people, as the retirement wave lands. Every city that waits will be doing this later, with less room to do it carefully.
A city can subsidise, or a city can stop being the reason something takes eleven months. The second one has no line in the budget and compounds every year it holds.
Every month a file sits in a queue is a month of housing not occupied and capital not earning, with the interest running the whole time. Duration is the one variable in a construction project that a city controls directly.
A restaurant that opens two months late is two months of wages, turnover and Gewerbesteuer that never existed. Multiply by the registrations a city processes in a year and it is not a rounding error.
The skilled worker a Munich employer wants can also be hired in Amsterdam or Zurich. Processing time is a competitive variable, and it is the one a city can move without asking anyone's permission.
These durations are already collected. Publishing them, and then moving them, is the cheapest credible growth story a city administration has available to it.
MEASURE · PUBLISH · MOVE · REPEATWe would rather be stopped at day ninety against a clean measurement than carried for three years on a roadmap nobody can check.
Start at the queue that embarrasses you.
It is also the one that pays back fastest.
These are not concessions we make to win a tender. They are the reason the architecture was built the way it was, and they are why an offering assembled from an American hyperscaler cannot match it.
Yours, or your municipal IT provider's. No inference leaves the building, no citizen data is sent to a third party, and there is no CLOUD-Act question to answer in the DSGVO assessment. The reasoning core is ours end to end, which is the only reason we can promise this.
Handed over, in escrow or outright. If we disappear tomorrow, the city keeps running what it paid for. Vendor lock-in is the standing complaint of public IT, and the answer to it is contractual, not reassuring words.
A city with real in-house capability does not need another supplier building a black box next to it. Your engineers are on the build from week one, and operations are handed across by design, not negotiated afterwards.
Nothing is issued automatically unless a department explicitly chooses it for a class of routine case. Everything else is drafted for a person, traceable to its basis, and signed by a name, which is what makes it lawful and what makes it defensible.
Works with what exists, meaning the DMS, the eAkte, the Fachverfahren and the ERP, over the interfaces they already publish. We have never needed a department to change its system in order to start.
Building permits, business registration, licensing and procurement look broadly the same in every German city, then broadly the same again across Europe: different paragraphs, the same shape. What is solved in one administration transfers, and the city that goes first sets the pattern rather than inheriting someone else's.
The sovereignty requirement is identical everywhere: a Land, a Bundesbehörde and a European institution all need the reasoning to stay inside their own walls. That is the requirement no hyperscaler-based offering can meet, and it is the one we built for first.
One city today, a Land next, then the Bund and the EU. The same architecture, the same guarantees, the same insistence that a named person signs at the end.
SOVEREIGN BY ARCHITECTURE · NOT BY POLICYA working session with the department that owns your worst duration. Half a day, no obligation, and you keep the baseline whatever you decide afterwards.
URIM Technologies · München · Under NDA from first contact.