Process optimization for world-class municipal services

Citizens come first

The city of Ajman UAE knows that today’s citizens, residents and businesses are increasingly demanding, pressuring governments to quickly meet their needs while constantly improving their lives. To achieve this, the city’s Municipality and Planning Department needed better process organization, visibility and optimization—and fast.

Work in process

Ajman’s Municipality and Planning Department’s process documentation was heavily manual, and the department had difficulty understanding intricacies and dependencies between processes. Optimization was inadequate, and improvements slow.

It decided to implement a comprehensive process management and improvement framework, powered by ARIS, to enhance operational excellence, and propel Ajman Municipality toward a future of innovation and citizen-centricity. It chose ARIS to create a transparent, efficient and citizen-centric process environment, giving it a single repository of its business processes, services and risks, in context.

Transparent, efficient, citizen-centric

In September 2022, Ajman Municipality began its journey to revolutionize process management using ARIS. The team worked together with Palmira Software House to create a clear project plan, laying down requirements and responsibilities and aligning different departments. Its aim was to create a transparent, efficient and citizen-centric process environment.

Since then, the Municipality has become the first government entity in Ajman to adopt ARIS as a comprehensive process management framework. In doing so, it expanded its process architecture from 130 to 325 processes (classified according to the APQC’s Process Classification Framework for benchmarking and best practices).

Together with Palmira, we mapped our main services through service tree, canvas and customer journey diagrams—ensuring a deep understanding of citizen interactions and touchpoints.

“Business agility and compliance are crucial to our government services, with ARIS this is much easier,” said Ibrahim AlReyami, Head of Quality & Excellence Programs.

Single repository enables collaboration

With ARIS, the Municipality created comprehensive models for each department, integrating various elements like risk, KPIs and strategy by using specialized strategy diagrams. It also integrated Ajman Municipality’s 14 strategic goals within ARIS, ensuring every process and service contributes to achieving its overarching objectives.

Departments are now aligned, thanks to the standardization of business processes in a single repository. “Our operations are standardized in a single repository, so collaboration across the department is made easier by speaking business process language in ARIS,” said Director of Strategy & Excellence Department at MPDA, Fatima Mohammed Abdullah AlMulla.

Ajman Municipality integrated its 14 strategic goals within ARIS, ensuring every process and service contributes to achieving overarching objectives. It now expects its digital transformation acceleration to increase by 15% in 2025, and it will be able to decrease design and analysis time by 20% in 2025.

Select employees have received special training targeted for 20 Designer users, as well as an extensive training for five Admin users.

ARIS for now, and for the future

Its ARIS implementation was done using a holistic approach—going beyond process mapping and creating a comprehensive framework that integrates strategy, risk management, KPIs, service mapping and departmental modeling

“We didn’t just implement ARIS; we’ve leveraged its full potential as a strategic tool,” said Ibrahim AlReyami, Head of Quality & Excellence Programs.

This holistic approach fosters a deeper understanding of interdependencies and empowers data-driven decision-making across the organization, ensuring every process is optimized from the citizen’s perspective.

“Today, ARIS is the Municipality’s tool for better process management language and operational excellence in today and future,” according to Mr. Salman Muhannd Ibrahim Alissa, Senior Business Process Improvement Specialist.

“The project outcome will strategically position Ajman Municipality as a global reference in operational excellence and sustainability,” said Jamal AlMahamid, CEO Palmira Software House LLC and MetrixPlus