Sarichioi lies on the Dobrogea shore of Lake Razim, in Tulcea County. Through the project “Simplification of administrative procedures at the level of Sarichioi Commune” (MySMIS 154984), financed by the European Social Fund under the Administrative Capacity Operational Programme, the commune set out to cut bureaucracy for residents by working on both sides of the counter at once — front office and back office.

Initial Challenges

Sarichioi’s records were largely physical. The commune held internal paper archives organised into archival units, while documents still in operational use sat in folders inside individual departments. Digital tools existed, but only as isolated applications — one for the agricultural register, another for document handling — with no shared identity, no shared data and no single entry point for citizens.

Key pain points included:

• Paper archives whose retrieval depended on physically locating a file
• Operational documents kept in departmental folders rather than a common repository
• Separate legacy applications with no interoperability between them
• A real risk of simply replicating paper forms online instead of redesigning the service
• No electronic identity for citizens and no private space where they could follow their own files

The Smart Solution

Vision delivered an integrated electronic services platform covering the commune’s shared competences — public order and safety, social assistance benefits, the agricultural register, local taxes and urban planning. Citizens use an external portal that also runs as a mobile application and in self-service kiosk mode; staff work in an internal back-office portal; an integration and orchestration layer and a single administration console sit behind both.

Two principles shaped the design. Services were built around what a resident is trying to achieve, not around a digital copy of a paper form. And information the administration already holds is entered once — the “once-only” principle — so that the citizen’s electronic identity and private virtual space carry data forward from one request to the next. Single sign-on gives staff one set of credentials across every module, with permissions derived from the organisational chart.

In parallel, roughly 100,000 pages of the commune’s archive were retro-digitised at 600 dpi into searchable PDF/A, with ten to twenty metadata fields captured per document type, then loaded into the platform’s operational archive through a dedicated connector and linked onward to a legally authorised electronic archive.

Implementation Insights

The project ran over twenty weeks in five overlapping stages: delivery of equipment and licences, analysis and design, iterative configuration and testing, a restricted-access pilot, and training.

• Pilot before production – the platform went live first for a limited group of users, so workflows could be corrected against real cases before the whole commune moved across.
• The archive treated as its own discipline – retro-digitisation was carried out in authorised processing centres, with no more than 15% of archival units permitted to be unbound, protecting the originals.
• Training at unusual depth for a small administration – 30 people were trained, including one elected official and ten with management responsibilities, each receiving at least 16 hours of instruction, alongside three system administrators and five internal trainers.

Results & Impact

Sarichioi ended the project with both a working service platform and a decade of paperwork made searchable.

Quantitative Results:

• Five service areas digitised — public order and safety, social assistance, the agricultural register, local taxes and urban planning
• ~100,000 pages of archive retro-digitised at 600 dpi into indexed, searchable records
• 30 staff trained, with 16 hours of instruction each and five internal trainers certified
• Unlimited user licensing with perpetual rights and three years of warranty and support

Qualitative Results:

• Residents submit and follow requests from a private virtual space instead of returning to the counter for updates
• Archived documents are retrieved by search rather than by physical lookup, and originals are handled far less
• Staff work in a single system with one set of credentials across all modules
• The commune retains an internal training capability rather than depending on the supplier

Lessons Learned & Key Takeaways

The most consequential decision in Sarichioi was refusing to digitise the paperwork as it stood. Rebuilding services around outcomes, and enforcing the once-only principle, is what turned an online form into an actual simplification. The second lesson concerns the archive: digitising legacy documents alongside the new platform, rather than after it, meant that staff had their historical records available in the same interface from the day the system went live.