Visitors expertise Madrid by way of its open-air terraces, midnight dinners, crowded plazas and galleries crammed with masterpieces. They transfer between the Prado Museum, the tapas bars of La Latina, the boutiques of Salamanca and the soccer frenzy across the Bernabéu and Metropolitano.
What vacationers hardly ever see is the executive engine that retains certainly one of Europe’s busiest capital cities functioning day after day.
Madrid City Council is now rebuilding a lot of that engine by way of a serious SAP modernisation mission overlaying finance, taxation and human assets. In a case research offered at Sapphire 2026, SAP’s flagship European convention in Madrid, delegates heard that the mission prolonged a relationship with SAP that started in 2004 and moved into non-public cloud infrastructure in 2020. The newest part introduces RISE with SAP and SAP Business Technology Platform, consolidating municipal techniques right into a unified digital surroundings.
For a metropolis whose tourism financial system relies upon closely on eating places, inns, retail districts and leisure venues, the techniques working behind the scenes have develop into more and more essential. Madrid’s café terraces alone kind a part of the town’s identification, spreading throughout pavements and plazas from Malasaña to Plaza Mayor.
The metropolis says two-thirds of its tax revenues are already managed throughout the new surroundings, together with property tax, city waste tax for enterprise actions, capital features tax and terrace tax collections.
Madrid has additionally built-in SAP Tax and Revenue Management into its monetary platform, permitting tax assortment and monetary administration to function throughout the identical system.
During the primary 12 months of the mission, the municipality cleaned and harmonised data from earlier techniques, cross-checking identities and addresses towards police databases, the Spanish Tax Agency and the municipal avenue registry.
“SAP technology offers us an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate our digital transformation and make the vision of a more efficient, innovative, and citizen-centric local government a tangible reality,” mentioned Juan Corro, IT supervisor of Madrid City Council (IAM). “This mission marks a paradigm shift: we’re shifting from managing paper recordsdata and remoted techniques to managing info and processes in an built-in and clever approach, with a 360-degree view.
“As a major capital city, Madrid has both the responsibility and the opportunity to position itself at the forefront of administrative modernisation, serving as a benchmark for other municipalities.”
The municipality says automation and AI capabilities constructed into the ERP system are enhancing operational effectivity by way of capabilities equivalent to automated financial institution reconciliations and funds allocations.
Madrid additionally says the “paperless” administration mannequin has been consolidated, with HR requests dealt with digitally by way of the municipal intranet.
Carlos Lacerda, senior vp and managing director of SAP Southern Europe, mentioned: “SAP remains firmly committed to the Spanish public sector, which we have supported in its modernization processes for decades. This project is a benchmark for advanced digital administration and demonstrates how technology can act as a strategic enabler to simplify processes, integrate information, and strengthen real-time data-driven decision-making, laying the foundation for a more agile, innovative, and service-oriented public administration.”
The mission additionally introduces a subscription and pay-per-use IT mannequin meant to scale back upfront infrastructure prices and permit techniques to scale based on municipal demand.
Madrid says the platform will assist future integration of AI and superior analytics as the town develops broader sensible administration capabilities.