beePRO.city – Smart City Toolbox
The consulting expertise of a smart city startup — in a production-ready SaaS platform
The Challenge
Cities and municipalities face a structural problem: dozens of projects run simultaneously across various departments, divisions, and staff units — with zero central transparency. Department A plans a new residential quarter, Department B works on a greening initiative, and neither knows about the other. Synergies go untapped, efforts get duplicated, and the overview of overarching strategy progress is an Excel spreadsheet at best.
bee smart city knew this problem from years of consulting practice. Their smart city consulting approach — structuring strategies, linking projects, and measuring progress — worked, but it was manual, consultant-dependent, and not scalable. The core question: how do we turn this consulting knowledge into a digital product that supports the consulting work and empowers municipalities to manage their strategy execution independently and continuously?
The challenges in detail:
- Information silos: Projects existed in isolation within departments. There was no central place where all initiatives were visible and comparable.
- Missing strategy alignment: Municipalities had strategies on topics like digital transformation, climate protection, or housing — but no tool to map projects to these topics and measure strategic progress.
- Compliance & Frameworks: Requirements from federal, state, or EU level (e.g., climate protection KPI targets for 2030) had to be tracked — without any standardized tracking.
- Collaboration gaps: Cross-departmental collaboration failed due to a lack of shared tools and communication channels.
- GDPR & Hosting: As a public administration, strict data protection and hosting requirements applied: mandatory hosting in Germany, with the option of cloud or on-premises infrastructure.
- Complex environment: The public sector comes with unique constraints: public procurement obligations, political decision-making processes, and funding program logic that cause long decision cycles and demand a product that flexibly adapts to this reality.
The Solution
We designed and built the beePRO.city Toolbox together with bee smart city as a modular SaaS platform that digitizes bee smart city's proven consulting framework and gives municipalities an intuitive tool for strategy and multi-project management.
Strategy management with hierarchical topic structure & framework mapping
At its core is a flexible strategy module: municipalities create overarching strategies, break them down into action areas and sub-topics (e.g., digital transformation → open data → data platform), and define KPIs at every level. Projects "contribute" to these KPIs. This creates a seamless link between day-to-day operations and strategic objectives. Everything from the high-level overview down to individual project details can be statistically analyzed and visually presented across the board.
Strategies can be mapped to external frameworks such as EU directives, sustainability goals, or state-level funding programs. This makes it visible which of a municipality's own action areas contribute to which overarching requirements. The further integration and analysis of framework KPIs and their automated tracking was in active development at the end of the project.
Multi-project management & operational project work
Every project gets an interactive dashboard with metadata, responsibilities, budget information, and links to strategy topics. Project lists with search and filter functions make a municipality's entire project portfolio searchable and analyzable. Decision-makers see at a glance: "We have many projects contributing to digital transformation, but barely any in climate protection."
Within each project, work packages and tasks can be created, assigned, and tracked. Automatically generated status reports (weekly/monthly) document progress and surface bottlenecks. All without manual reporting effort.
Integrated chat and comment features enable context-specific coordination directly within the project. Notifications via email and in-app ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Security & tenant isolation
GDPR-compliant, developed and hosted in Germany. Each customer gets a dedicated Kubernetes cluster. This guarantees complete data isolation at the infrastructure level.
The Results
- Production-ready platform: A fully functional strategy and multi-project management solution, tested and deployed in live operation by multiple German municipalities.
- International pilot operation: The platform was additionally tested and validated in an extensive pilot phase with numerous Polish municipalities.
- Strategic steering: For the first time, municipalities could identify — based on data — which strategy topics are well-supported by projects and where gaps exist.
- Digital consulting companion: The toolbox complements smart city consulting as a digital tool
- Automated reporting: Status reports can be generated automatically — less manual effort, more time for actual project work.
- Enterprise-grade infrastructure: Dedicated Kubernetes clusters per customer implement a hosting model that meets the highest data protection and tenant isolation requirements of public sector clients.
AKARA Solutions made our consulting concept tangible with the beePRO.city Toolbox. For the first time, our partner municipalities could independently see which projects contribute to which strategic goals — and collaborate across departments instead of remaining siloed in isolated divisions.
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