Case Study: Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia achieves a paperless, record‑fast census (preliminary in 1 month, official in 6) with Microsoft Power Apps

Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia - Customer Case Study

The Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, the national agency responsible for the decennial population census, faced slow, insecure legacy on‑premises systems that previously required about 18 months to publish official census results and could not handle required concurrent users. To run Serbia’s first fully paperless census, the Office adopted Microsoft Cloud technologies — including Azure, SQL Server, and Power BI — and used Microsoft Power Apps to support field operations.

The vendor implemented a hybrid‑cloud architecture with encrypted SQL Server storage, Azure services for scalability and security, Power BI for real‑time monitoring and live maps, and a Microsoft Power Apps–based ticketing system for regional IT support; machine learning automated coding of open‑ended responses. With Microsoft Power Apps and the wider Microsoft stack, preliminary results were produced in one month and official results in six months (vs. 18 previously), open‑ended encoding time dropped from nine months to two hours, and the error rate fell to about 1%.

Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia

Miladin Kovacevic

Chief Executive Officer