The Italian region of Emilia-Romagna has rolled-out a digital platform which provides a centralised place for businesses to fill in administrative documents and other essential paperwork. Almost all the region’s municipalities are now affiliated to the platform, which was developed through the EU-backed Unified Access project. The new online system deals with around 9 000 administrative procedures every month, helping to make life easer for thousands of end-users including SMEs, larger companies and individual business professionals.
- 04 February 2020
The project provides a unified and up-to-date online service for all administrative documents for business in Emilia Romagna, managed at regional level and deployed in cooperation with the municipalities.
The platform was designed to manage business red tape more efficiently, allowing companies to carry out administrative tasks such authenticating their identities and making payment applications. It also acts the municipal register for real estate, environmental matters and seismic procedures.
Good for business
The beauty of the online register for users is that they only need to fill in forms once – these details can then be easily shared by all the affiliated municipalities and local administrations. Updates to forms and official documents can be dealt with swiftly.
Centralising services in this way allows user support activities to be unified through a help desk. The platform issues a singe reference for all updates and handles data security issues. The web application used to access the platform provides the same front-end page to all regional customers.
The platform provides simplified back-office software to municipalities that do not have such resources. More generally, the platform is proving to be a great asset to some of the region’s smaller municipalities that have been unable to develop their own high-quality online systems due to cost factors and technical complexities.
Other benefits that come with the platform include automatic checks during data recording, which cuts down on errors while increasing the quality of stored information. For municipalities, software development, management and maintenance costs are greatly reduced with this single, unified system.
Solid uptake
As of May 2019, 316 out of 328 of the region’s local administrations were signed up to the platform. It provides a repository that allows institutions to share files and solve problems relating to the transmission of large attachments. Plus with a shared platform, processes for adapting documents and forms can be simplified, for example when regulations are changed. Amendments can be applied once and are immediately available to all municipalities.
Development of the online services was made possible through a collaboration between the Emilia-Romagna region, Lepida Scpa (an in-house company involved in the governance of regional ICT), technical officers from the different municipalities, business organisations like the chambers of commerce and national institutions that manage company data.
Total investment and EU funding
Total investment for the project “Unified access to online services for Emilia-Romagna enterprises” is EUR 3 861 000, with the EU’s European Regional Development Fund contributing EUR 1 931 000 through the “Emilia Romagna ERDF” Operational Programme for the 2014-2020 programming period. The investment falls under the priority “ICT”.