The Challenge
Document management is a critical and also a very paper intensive procedure in financial services industry. In our case over 60 million customers worldwide generate billions of documents that circulate between client’s branches in 70 countries.
Today every single document is generated digitally and thus has to be managed automatically within the corporate information system. The existing document management solution was unable to cope with the growing requirements.
The challenge was to streamline document production and document exchange across a multinational corporation and integrate the solution seamlessly with the customer’s existing document lifecycle management platform based on Lotus Notes/Domino and IBM DB2.
The main problem was that in the existing Lotus solution all three tiers (Presentation, Business Logic and Data) were implemented within one module. What seems logical at first sight could have coused major problems in future as any change in any of tiers would cause changes in all other tiers.
SOA Solution
AIT Infotech proposed to deliver a SOA based enterprise document management solution, that would provide reliable and convenient EDM web services to all related IT systems across the client's corporation.
AIT Infotech's specialists started with throughout assessment of the client's existing IT systems. Software Requirements Specifications document encompassed all the data we gathered. After we identified critical integration issues and the basic set of requirements, our senior programmers asigned for the project have created high level design & architectecture concept document. The document covered top-level design of the application server, database server, and client software.
At AIT Infotech it is a common practice within such large scale projects to desribe design and architecture in object-oriented manner, based on software requirements. After software design document was created and signed off on client's side, we started the main development phase. The whole software development process was carried out within a custom taylored Rational Unified Process (RUP).
The solution was designed in service oriented architecture (SOA), that is - a group of services, which communicate with each other. AIT Infotech's solution was designed as a set of loosly coupled subsystems divided functionally. The linkages between subsystems have been made loose in order to have a single well defined interface for all subsystems and to be able to develop additional modules separately by independent developer teams. However, the main mission of SOA was to allow to streamline document management processes while still using the existing legacy systems as the basis. The client access to the system services was provided through web services. The subsystems developed by AIT Infotech included:
Document production module that generates template-based documents using the runtime data from a relational database or Lotus Domino.
Document management module that manages documents metadata, generic data (templates), rules of extraction of runtime data, etc.
Document exchanging module that routes generated documents to physical addresses via a 3-rd party software.
Document history application that keeps the full information about all early printed documents.
Thus AIT Infotech's custom developed SOA solution addressed every stage of document lifecycle – from creation and capture, through management and delivery, to archival and final form storage. The system has been installed across all affiliates of multinational insurer.
AIT Infotech's custom developed SOA solution provided the following business benefits to the Fortune 100 insurer:
High EDM scalability on low cost is achieved due to modular architecture
Costs of legacy systems' replacement are avoided due to full integration through SOA
Tools and Technologies
- Application Server: Apache Tomcat
- Database Server: MS SQL 2005
- Languages: Java, JSP/Servlets, JavaScript, DHTML, AJAX, Hibernate
Related links
http://www.ait-infotech.com/financial-software-development.html 
