How Meschede fully automates its demographic reporting with Polyteia.
From Excel to interactive dashboards: The City of Meschede uses Polyteia to analyze, process and publish demographic data.
About.
The City of Meschede has around 30,000 inhabitants and is located in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Hochsauerland County. In a demographic context, it fulfills tasks such as planning age-appropriate infrastructure, promoting family services, designing educational and care services and taking demographic developments into account in urban and social planning.
Challenge.
The Generations, Education and Leisure department of the City of Meschede is responsible for analyzing demographic developments, among other things, in order to make well-founded decisions for the planning and management of the municipality. The manual processing of demographic data tied up a lot of resources: inquiries about the population structure caused a lot of work, and the annual demographic report was error-prone and time-consuming using Microsoft Excel. Moreover, the information was only available to the public as static PDF documents that quickly became outdated.
Solution.
The city administration commissioned Polyteia to provide its software suite and addtional professional services to connect the HSH VOIS MESO legacy system (resident registry) and automatically integrate demographic data into the platform. Users can nowanalyze their data without coding skills, flexibly create their own insights and work together on digital reports, e.g. on population development, age structure or migration movements. They can also manually integrate custom data sources such as Excel or CSV files via an upload function and merge them with the demographic data. Since the introduction of the Polyteia platform, the City of Meschede has also been able to publish selected insights on its website at the click of a button and thus answer inquiries about population developments and trends, for example, without any additional communication effort. To enable more complex calculations and analyses, the City of Meschede commissioned Polyteia to set up additional data models. These automatically provide up-to-date demographic key figures, which flow directly into a digital demographic report and are available to users in a formatted form.
