Internal document management optimization

Alfa-Bank is one of the largest privately-owned banks in Russia that offers a full range of banking services available on the financial market.

Since January 3, 1991, the bank has held a license from the Central Bank of Russia to conduct operations involving money from both individuals and enterprises in rubles and foreign currencies.

Alfa-Bank is registered as a participant in the deposit insurance system and is a prominent player in the securities market.

As of 2021, Alfa-Bank holds the fourth position in terms of assets, with a total of 5 billion rubles. The bank’s services are used by around 22 million individuals and more than 1 million organizations.
With over 500 offices worldwide, Alfa-Bank is considered a systemically important credit organization by the Central Bank of Russia.

For a long time, Alfa-Bank had been utilizing a custom EDM solution developed in-house. The system had a significant legacy from outdated technologies, including various old versions of React. This accumulated a lot of systemic architectural problems, which hindered further development and scaling of the system. Additionally, the deployment of microservices had encountered problems due to the absence of automated application testing.

The Unified Document Management System (UDMS) is a critical software system for businesses. The new 2.0 version was intended to replace the previous UDMS. The development team faced challenges in upgrading the system due to the legacy technologies and customized solutions used by foreign vendors.

Before starting the development process, an analysis was conducted and the features of the first version of UDMS were studied. Our specialists noticed a large number of customized solutions based on legacy technologies, as well as the absence of a configured process for testing microservices and updates to them.

The internal document management system for Alfa Bank employees was decided to be developed in Java. The client hired Digex Co. as a contractor to develop UDMS 2.0. We were responsible for the frontend and backend used for interaction with microservices in Java. Our engineers also worked on integrating the new system with the bank’s IT landscape.

The topology of the new version of UDMS is represented by a single interface for document management, into which other subsystems are integrated. With the help of UDMS 2.0, bank employees should be able to perform routine actions, such as entering transactions, attaching documents, and approving them.

An additional task for the Digex Co. team was to replace the vendor ABBYY’s solutions with in-house ones. Our specialists developed another interface for scanning documents and prepared a proxy-backend for this small service, responsible for interacting with microservices. A separate web application was created with the ability to scan documents and attach already prepared PDF files. Developers implemented the function of scanning files and reading barcodes inside them to systematize these documents, facilitate searching, and add metadata to files.

The new Unified Document Management System version 2.0 was presented in 2022. Within a single interface, the system closed the entire cycle of document management tasks within the company. UDMS 2.0 was implemented painlessly for existing business processes, gradually replacing the previous version of EDM.

The system allowed bank employees to solve daily document management tasks in a unified window of the updated user interface. Setting tasks, opening and closing deals, attaching documents, conducting multi-level approvals — all of these tasks are now performed by UDMS 2.0. With the update, the system got rid of custom solutions based on foreign software and self-written legacy microservices that previously hindered further development and scaling.

In parallel with the development of the new version of UDMS, the Digex Co. team set up CI/CD. Our engineers automated testing scenarios for new updates and provided consulting on DevOps processes for the bank’s application development teams. Additionally, the Digex Co. team completely updated the UDMS technical support meta-library to ensure that the new technology stack is known to all internal developers of Alfa-Bank.

documents are in the process of approval daily within UDMS 2.0

types of processes and approvals are supported by UDMS 2.0

40+

applications have been integrated with the system

25 000+

Alfa-Bank employees are using the updated EDM system

2х

Time-to-market has been reduced by 2X with the introduction of CI/CD automation

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