Horezu, a small town in Vâlcea County known abroad for its UNESCO-listed ceramics, committed to digitising its administration end to end. Under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Component C10 – Local Fund, project C10-I1.1-67), the town hall commissioned an integrated Smart City platform spanning the full range of local government: citizen-facing services, internal workflows, local taxation and financial management.

Initial Challenges

Horezu started from a position familiar to Romanian towns of its size. Services were delivered almost exclusively at the counter, departments kept separate records, and every request meant a visit during office hours. The administration’s own needs analysis was blunt about it: a growing number of citizens to serve, internal procedures that had never been simplified, and no way to show residents what was happening with their files.

Key pain points included:

• Services available only at the counter, with no online route for permits, certificates or petitions
• Internal procedures and working methods still manual and undocumented
• Fragmented departmental records, making end-to-end tracking of a file impossible
• Limited transparency, with no channel for residents to follow projects or take part in decisions
• No consolidated view of a citizen’s or a company’s relationship with the town hall

The Smart Solution

Vision delivered a configurable commercial off-the-shelf platform, built on microservices and adapted to Horezu without custom development. It brings together an external portal for citizens and businesses, a public presentation website, an internal back-office portal for the town hall and its subordinate institutions, and a specialised back office for local taxes, financial accounting, human resources and payroll — all sharing one database and one security model.

More than thirty modules went into production: urban planning, public domain, civil registry, transport, social assistance, hearings, public information and petitions, the agricultural register, commercial authorisations, local taxes, public relations, local police, registry, human resources, procurement, audit, investments, contracts, legal, control body, ticketing and the internal managerial control system. A configurable GIS map layer supports the local police in the field on tablets and phones, and a reasoning-based AI module raises alerts on possible fraud, correlates records across departments and helps forecast workload.

Residents reach the same services three ways — through the portal in any browser, through the mobile application, or at the self-service info-kiosk in the town hall, where identity is confirmed by an ID-card reader and the session ends with the transaction. Documents are signed with a local token or a cloud-based qualified certificate, records generated by the system are sealed automatically, and payments are made by card.

Implementation Insights

The schedule was deliberately tight: hardware and licences within four weeks of signature, the platform within two months, final acceptance within six weeks of the service order. Meeting it depended on configuring rather than coding.

• Configuration over development – workflows, business rules, document templates and screens were built in the platform’s visual editors, so corrections happened during the project instead of waiting for a release.
• Integrations mapped up front – connectors to ROeID, the Trade Register, the Romanian Auto Register, ghiseul.ro/SNEP, ANAF PatrimVen and ForExeBug were specified before configuration began, so the fiscal and financial modules could reconcile against national systems from the start.
• Training built into handover – ten staff completed at least eight hours of instruction each, alongside system-administrator and train-the-trainer sessions, and kept course materials in Romanian.

Results & Impact

Horezu now runs its administration on one system instead of several. The delivered scope is what makes the change visible.

Quantitative Results:

• 30+ modules in production across citizen services, internal operations, taxation and finance
• Three access channels for every citizen service — web portal, mobile application and in-hall info-kiosk
• Electronic registration and OCR indexing of all incoming and outgoing documents, with full-text search and a legally compliant archive connector
• Unlimited user licensing with perpetual rights, plus three years of hosting, support and adaptive maintenance

Qualitative Results:

• Citizens start, track and complete requests without visiting the counter
• Every file carries a unique identifier and a complete audit trail across departments
• Council projects and participatory budgeting are published in the citizen portal
• The town’s public website and its service portal share one identity and one content system

Lessons Learned & Key Takeaways

Horezu shows that the size of an administration does not have to limit how far digitisation goes. A town of this scale adopted the same platform depth as a city district, because the system was configured around its organisational chart and its own procedures rather than the other way round. Two decisions carried most of the weight: treating the portal, the kiosk and the mobile app as one omnichannel service rather than three separate projects, and insisting on unlimited perpetual licensing, so that adding users or opening a new service later costs nothing.