Intrum Justitia Increases IT Flexibility with ARIS Bridge Integration

Intrum Justitia, Europe’s leading provider of debt collection and claim management services, has extended the usage possibilities of its current ARIS Platform through utilization of the ARIS Bridge integration from IDS Scheer and E2E. The joint solution combines the ARIS Platform tools from IDS Scheer, the leading provider of Business Process Management (BPM), with the E2E Bridge product.

Use of the ARIS Bridge has allowed Intrum Justitia to redesign its in-house ReCash application completely in UML. This effort marks the world’s first project in which a purely model-driven approach based on UML model execution has been used for both process modeling as well as technical implementation of processes and for application development. Using this approach, Intrum Justitia has increased the flexibility of its IT infrastructure, avoided complex manual programming and increased its change management abilities. The project was a collaboration of E2E and Trivadis and managed by IDS Scheer.

The ARIS Bridge integration is a jointly-developed combination of the E2E and IDS Scheer products that bridges the gap, present in almost all organizations, between business processes and IT applications. It provides a common codification of the commercial and technical requirements within an organization, simplifying process-oriented integration of all existing back-end systems. As a next-generation ESB based on a high performance UML Virtual Machine, the ARIS Bridge permits direct execution of UML models that describe reusable enterprise services together with their logic and interfaces. The use of UML models instead of code offers unparalleled transparency when technically implementing the processes. The ARIS Bridge also serves as a universal adaptor that allows inclusion of a wide variety of existing back-end systems when creating a modern service-oriented or event-driven architecture.

As Daniel Seiler, Finance Director at Intrum Justitia AG points out: “The unique, purely model-driven approach of the ARIS Bridge has drastically reduced the project and administrative costs of our ReCash solution. Administrators, account managers and others access ReCash on a daily basis. Development times have been cut by factors and change management has never been simpler. Whereas in the past it took IT specialists five to seven days to familiarize themselves with the application code in order to make meaningful changes, the familiarization time for executable UML models is only two hours, because by using the ARIS Bridge the documentation is also the code. We now have, for the first time ever, a completely clear path from the process through to the application. We’re absolutely thrilled by this elegant combination of the IDS Scheer and E2E technologies – and currently there’s nothing on the market that even begins to approach it.”

“The key to successful SOA integration is to align the application landscape with rapidly changing target processes. Unfortunately, the communicative gap between modeled business processes and manually coded interfaces causes many SOA initiatives to fail. That’s exactly what we’re addressing by integrating these two best-in-class products,” says Karl Wagner, Head of ARIS Product Management and Development at IDS Scheer.

The challenge at Intrum Justitia consisted of two aspects: 1) simplifying access to data in a central Oracle database, and 2) making modifications to business logic, necessary due to country-specific process requirements, easier to carry out. These issues had to be addressed without manually extending the PL/SQL code which had grown and evolved over time. Based on the integration possibilities inherent in the ARIS Bridge, Intrum decided to transfer the existing PL/SQL code to an executable UML (Unified Modeling Language) model that exactly and clearly describes the business logic throughout the organization and totally documents database access at any point in time. Changes in the UML model can be made instantly and time-consuming new coding is eliminated. Since the UML models are both documentation and code, frequent changes are readily traceable for all participants.