Ethias had a legacy instance of Documentum which couldn't fulfill the need of bringing new services to their external customers and couldn't keep up with the standards their internal customers were requesting regarding the collaboration under the branch offices. New business requirements were mandated to drive more value from documents, which led to increased security and the introduction of more metadata to drive operational process efficiency. None of these could be met easily with the current Documentum architecture in place.

1. REDUCING TOTAL
COST OF
OWNERSHIP AND
INCREASING
SCALABILITY
X E N I T C A S E S T U D Y
with Xenit Solution and
Alfresco Digital Platform

2. ABOUT ETHIAS
Ethias is the third largest insurer in Belgium,
employing around 1,800 people with 2
main headquarters in Liege and Hasselt and more
than 40 regional offices across
Belgium. With more than a million loyal customers,
Ethias directly insures public
authorities, companies and private individuals
without requiring them to use a
broker.
2018

3. 1800
people
1M
customers
2 HQs
40
offices
8 M
Ethias had a legacy instance of
Documentum which couldn't fulfill
the need of bringing new services
to their external customers and
couldn't keep up with the
standards their internal customers
were requesting regarding the
collaboration under
the branch offices.

4. THE CHALLENGES
Since 2008, the Ethias team has used Documentum
for their document and email
archiving needs, hosted by service partner NRB.
However, they faced high recurring
costs for low added value as Documentum's main
function was to serve as a
storage system leveraging only basic content
management capabilities.
New business requirements were mandated to drive
more value from documents,
which led to increased security and the introduction
of more metadata to drive
operational process efficiency. None of these could
be met easily with the current
Documentum architecture in place. Search and
retrieving documents was a
particular pain point for end users and led to poor
productivity when using the
system. In addition to these challenges, a new
document production platform and
also a new OCR process integration could have led
to poor exception handling and
error-prone metadata quality.

5. THE CHALLENGES
To address these challenges, Ethias wanted a
secure, agile and open architecture
with cloud-availability and scalability, which could
be deployed quickly for fast ROI.
All while giving them the flexibility to easily adapt,
which had been missing with their
current solution.
With a desire to integrate with Guidewire Policy &
Claim Centers and salesforce.com
and reduce their total cost of ownership, the new
solution needed to offer an
innovative approach to enterprise content
management (ECM) with an open and
agile architecture. In 2016, Alfresco Content
Services, hosted and packaged by
NRB as a cloud provider, with XeniT, Alfresco
Premier System Integrator Partner,
was selected.
The selection process included comparisons of
many vendors (EMC Documentum,
IBM Filenet, OpenText, Oracle) with different
integrators. Xenit demonstrated the
best understanding of Ethias' challenges through
the discovery and blue print
phases, combined with their mastery of the Alfresco
Digital Business platform.

6. THE SOLUTION
NRB & XeniT worked together to provide a 99.9%
high availability, cloud hosted
Alfresco Content Services solution, integrated with
object storage technology from
Caringo and an Oracle database, with limitless
content scalability, in just 6 months.
The migration from Documentum was simplified
with XeniTs content streaming tool
and NRB export routines, which transferred over 57
million documents to Alfresco in
under 3 months, with peaks of 5 million documents
in a weekend, and a rate of 50
documents per second in batches of 100,000
documents.
Not only did we ensure the data integrity during the
migration, but we even improved the data with the
setting of metadata that was missing previously.

7. THE SOLUTION
As a result, the migration of millions of
documents in the terabyte scale was successfully
completed, and Ethias went into production on
time.
Many organisations are a bit scared of the risk and
costs of migrations, but this was not
an issue for us due to the preparation and expertise
of the team. We have demonstrated
that a migration doesn't have to be a risky and
complex task. Now, we save a lot of
money each year using the new Alfresco Digital
Business Platform - it was definitely
worth the effort.
To facilitate integration, Xenit provided a GUI tool
(Alfred Finder) and an API that
simplified business integration for synchronous
interfaces. Larger streaming jobs
(asynchronous) are handled by Alfred Inflow. Due
to the API Gateway, Xenit controlled
the transactional behavior such that Solr and the
database can be tuned and
used at their proper strengths and capabilities.
Content is secured in motion
and at rest with Alfresco encryption.

8. THE SOLUTION
The architecture is built with docker containers,
helping to evolve in the future
without too many side effects and boundary
conditions. The adopted model
allowed to expose 3 modes of integration including
a direct access to the
GUI tool with an IAM layer making the solution
independent of any source
application for the exploitation of the documents.
Due to the modern architecture and the capabilities
around scalability and High Availability, Ethias was
able to offer a platform availability of 99.8%.
One of the major challenges was providing an ECM
solution on a distributed
platform with standardized SOAP integration points.
Today, we record a search and consultation
document every half seconds, we expect a
multiplication by 4 in the medium term.
Today, Alfresco is an independent platform built in
a sustainable form. All of the
high availability architectural criteria were met,
making Alfresco a critical content services
platform to support day-to-day operations.

9. ETHIAS
SIMPLIFIED
ARCHITECTURE

10. XENIT AND ALFRESCO
AT THE CORE OF THE
DIGITAL
TRANSFORMATION
By creating a common content service layer, Ethias
improved the simplicity and reliability
of its global IT architecture. Consequently, new
digital processes can be implemented
and integrated more rapidly. Alfresco takes care of
all content related services and
processes, and other applications consume the
service and engage in stable and
versioned interactions with Alfresco. Due to the
creation of a business API, all integration
with Alfresco from third party applications
(scanning, vertical insurance packages,
salesforce) is version controlled and resilient to
change. The Alfred business API lays a
foundation for future intense collaboration with
customers via the internet.
The necessary security layers and measures have
been put in place to support digital
customer and partner interaction in a secure
environment. Encryption, integration with
Identity Management solutions, proper access
control based upon metadata are part of
the protection strategy. Last but not least, a
container-based architecture will allow scale
to 100,000 user interactions and more than 100
million documents in the near future.
“Alfresco has proved to be
scalable and robust, while
API allowing easy integration
to other systems that was
crucial for project success.
Users
have the content in the
systems they use to get their
job done, with Alfresco
managing the content and
enabling advanced search
and viewing capabilities. This
has made
our processes more efficient."
-
Benoît Vard, Project
Manager,
Ethias
70

11. ACCELERATED TIME
TO VALUE WITH
XENIT AND ALFRESCO
SOLUTION
The first phase of deployment and migration took
under 9 months, with two additional
integrations delivered in the next 6 months. In
2017, major objectives were to create an
innovative and simple metadata driven Role Based
access control system, to improve
overall security and enrich the Ethias metadata
model to cope with future requirements
of GDPR, advanced integration and content
intelligence.
“Xenit offers great functional
and
technical expertise. Service
Operation and Service
Transition are
managed with the same
commitment and quality.
Ethias has
a true trusted partner to
work on new
challenges ahead." -
Benoît Vard, Project
Manager,
Ethias

12. RESULTS
Today, 70 million documents are now managed in
Alfresco, with 10 to 20 million
documents being added annually.
Most requests return search results in a matter of
seconds, via the business API, simple
integrations have been built in a short while,
supporting diverse integration partners
(Ernst & Young, NRB project teams, Deloitte) to
integrate vertical solutions with the
content services of Alfresco.
Total cost of operation of the solution was reduced
by at least 50% - main factors were
costs around maintenance, infrastructure and
setup. The operating expenses ("OPEX")
remains now stable with the new solution, and this
is the most important factor
for Ethias. They also reported a payback period of
less than 12 months, and
this already includes the costs for the initial setup
of the infrastructure and the
deployment.
The richer document model that is available now
supports more complex
queries, insightful exploration of documents and
support for upcoming
challenges like GDPR or mobile access.
70M50%

13. Thank
you
www.xenit.eu