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Aarau's Digital Transformation: Creating a Smart City Step By Step

The cantonal capital of Aargau and our digital specialists jointly developed a way to transform Aarau into an inclusive smart city for all residents. Using the the BSI Customer Suite paired with a clear vision, we developed a scalable implementation strategy that focuses on blending digital automation with personal human touch.

The challenge

What actually makes a city a smart city?

A short answer: when the quality of life of its residents is maximized in social, economic, and ecological terms while the consumption of resources is simultaneously minimized. To achieve this outcome, digitalization and the networking of information and communication systems make a big difference.

With innovative technology and integrated planning strategies, the processes in the organization and administration of a city be made more efficient, more social, and at the same time more resource-efficient. This hinges on a few success factors, including the interconnectedness of systems, comprehensive and meaningful data, and the thorough exchange of information and transparent cooperation between the various stakeholder groups. All of these components make it easier to tap into existing potential and enable the rapid scaling of smart city projects.

But how can a city become "smart" without losing its traditions?

Until the successful introduction of the BSI Customer Suite, the exchange between the citizens of the city of Aarau and the administration was predominantly analog and characterized by manual processes. Some administrative services had been successfully digitized on a cross-cantonal platform, the Smart Service Portal. For many services, though, Aarau residents still had to visit the city office or other municipal contact points in person or reach out via email or phone.

Overall, this led to time-consuming, error-prone, and inefficient processes. In particular, managing registrations and inquiries via manually maintained Excel lists meant a considerable amount of work for city staff. They had to deal with a lack of efficient methods for processing address and contact data, automating interactions, or exchanging data internally.

All of this said, the city of Aarau recognizes that fully digital processing of all administrative services is not always possible or desirable. They wanted to keep options open for personal visits to the city office for certain matters in order to enable direct human interaction, which cannot be completely replaced by digital means.

As a result, the city sought a hybrid solution even from its early planning stage. City staff wanted to combine the best of both worlds: the efficiency and convenience of digital processes, complemented by personal support and advice on site when needed. With this balanced mix of digital and personal services, the needs of all citizens should be fully taken into account and a high level of satisfaction with the city's services should be guaranteed.

The city of Aarau was able to define further goals for future customer relationship management (CRM): Not only should existing problems be solved and risks eliminated, but with the introduction of a CRM solution, the networked communication via various contact channels (e.g., email, website, SMS) should be efficiently designed and bundled.

At the same time, the system had to be able to "grow" flexibly with the city's individual use cases. Leading up to this effort, city administration project managers realized that the digital transformation of the city's facilities could not be implemented as part of a single large-scale project. Instead, it had to be designed as an iterative process using individual, easy-to-develop use cases.

The Solution

The BSI Customer Suite proved to be the best solution for the city of Aarau in the tender for a CRM system. BSI was not only able to score points with its high scalability and diverse interfaces, but also with its data storage in Switzerland. This was another important decision criterion for the city officials. As an added benefit, BSI has local proximity to Aaura.

Before the actual introduction of the BSI Customer Suite, the city carried out an assessment together with our team to clarify which administrative data records already existed and how they were stored. It quickly became clear that merging all the data would involve a great deal of effort and time. This led to the decision to gradually build up the BSI CRM database with the help of use cases in order to obtain a 360° view of the citizens that would be useful for further processes as the database grew.

The individual use cases were also implemented in hybrid form wherever possible and sensible. In other words, in addition to the digital touchpoints, analog aspects were taken into account in order to make the transformation to a digital smart city a fluid process that included low-tech population groups.

The following use cases already show the digital transformation program's success:


Use Case 1: Maienzug

Maienzug is an annual traditional children's and youth festival in Aarau. It marks the end of the school year at the beginning of July. The 400-year-old custom has developed into a large public event, with around 3,000 people now attending the festivities.

The digitalization of the invitation processing for the event was an important first step in combining tradition with technology. Within just two months, the previously analog ticket sales in the city office were converted to digital tickets with a QR code. The project team successfully implemented this with six BSI workflows, eleven landing pages, surveys, and internal newsletters in the BSI Customer Suite. As a result, more than 2,600 digital tickets found their buyers. At the same time, this use case enabled the first data records to be integrated into the CRM.


Use Case 2: Green waste subscription

Before the introduction of the BSI Customer Suite, Aarau residents had to buy an annual green waste sticker at an official counter and put it on their containers at home so that they could be emptied by the municipal waste collection service at regular intervals.

With the digitalization of this process, Aarau residents have been able to purchase a green waste subscription for different container sizes online since 2023. What's more, this subscription can be automatically renewed from year to year. It can also be paid for via an online payment solution.

An important component of this digitalized process is a data recognition chip, which replaces the previous green waste stickers and enables the containers to be clearly assigned to their owners. What's more, integrating the chip data into the BSI CX ensures that a standardized database is available.

In addition to simplifying the process for citizens, this use case has made incoming orders and the entire accounts receivable process in the administration significantly more efficient.


Use Case 3: City idea

The city idea is a test run for a participatory budget in Aarau. In a participatory budget, the population decides how part of the public money is spent. Ideas can be submitted and voted on. The city of Aarau provides the population with CHF 50,000, which they can decide how to spend.

For implementation in BSI CX, the project team developed a scenario for collecting citizen data and checking voting eligibility.

The data obtained in this way is also used for research. The city idea is part of the National Research Program "Digital Transformation" (NRP77), which is investigating the extent to which satisfaction and social coexistence in the city are influenced by various voting mechanisms.

Technical advantages

With the introduction of the BSI Customer Suite, processes in the administration of the city of Aarau were fully digitalized for the first time. Modern and user-friendly services were created for the citizens, which were well received from the outset and have been actively used to date.

The BSI Customer Suite's wide range of applications and the configurable, simple implementation of projects make it a tool that can be used to efficiently plan and introduce innovations. Today, employees don't just exchange data and information across departments, but also best practices. These are a motivating inspiration for the Aarau City Council.

The use of BSI's low-code and no-code solutions also means that adjustments and enhancements can be made without in-depth programming expertise. As a result, even employees without extensive IT knowledge can participate in the design process and get processes up and running independently.

Outlook

By integrating additional use cases, Aarau plans to deepen the intelligent networking of data and processes and extend digitalization to other areas.

For example, the introduction of online cemetery management could help relatives to carry out administrative tasks more easily during the challenging time of saying goodbye and mourning. This could include the implementation of a discreet registration option for cremations and the selection of the final resting places of family members based on a clear presentation of the grave locations in the municipal cemetery.

Another use case aims to make information and resources from the municipal library publicly accessible via the web. With this project, the city of Aarau is underlining its commitment to promoting education and knowledge through the use of modern technologies, while at the same time working toward making them accessible to the entire population.

With regard to the accessibility of data and information, the city of Aarau plans to develop the BSI Customer Suite into a modern administrative tool for a wide range of applications in the future. This will not only enable city administration employees to access relevant data and citizen information quickly and comprehensively, but also the citizens themselves. With a GDPR-compliant web portal, the city of Aarau wants to create a personalized point of contact for the needs of citizens, with a focus on user-friendliness and convenience in addition to data security.

In all of these ways, Aarau is developing into a smart city step by step.

The green waste subscription process has already been made 40% more efficient in its second year thanks to lower administrative costs and faster ordering options.

The efficiency of the May Day ticketing process was increased by more than 25% overall: the total cost of providing and purchasing tickets was noticeably reduced.

Thanks to improved targeting, the mailing for the city's "Kulturapéro" event generated a 35% higher response rate.

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