A NEW IT ARCHITECTURE FOR THE BUILDING INDUSTRY WITH ARIS AND WEBMETHODS
Company Size
1,000+
Region
- Europe
Country
- Germany
Product
- ARIS
- webMethods
Tech Stack
- ARIS
- webMethods
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Human Resources
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
Two institutions are under the SOKA-BAU umbrella: the Leave and Wage Equalization Fund for the German Building Industry (ULAK) and the Supplementary Health Insurance Company (ZVK). Both are organizations of parties to collective bargaining agreements in the building industry, which are comprised of the German National Building Association, the Trade Union for Building, Agriculture and the Environment, and the Central Federation of the German Construction Industry. The ULAK is responsible for ensuring leave entitlements and financing vocational training. The ZVK offers pension benefits to balance out structural disadvantages in retirement pensions. SOKA-BAU currently works to protect and support around 77,000 domestic and foreign companies with about 740,000 employees and 380,000 retired workers.
The Challenge
SOKA-BAU, a service provider for the construction industry, was relying on a series of legacy systems that had grown over time to manage its tasks. Although this environment could still meet demands, it was not able to provide fast and cost-effective IT support for new service offerings over the long term. Even small adjustments already took a great deal of effort. Furthermore, the IT infrastructure did not offer centralized data storage, so massive amounts of data needed to be stored and managed redundantly—also consuming major time and effort. For that reason, SOKA-BAU decided on a fundamental modernization to build its IT on a futureproof, scalable basis.
The Solution
In this modernization project, SOKA-BAU is investing largely in standardized software applications to also keep down the costs for the systems, their operation and maintenance. However, SOKA-BAU’s business model exhibits a series of unique features that cannot be easily covered with standard software. To unite the benefits of both worlds— standard and custom software—into a future-proof, agile IT architecture, SOKABAU is investing in a consistent process and service orientation (an SOA) over the individual application systems. Software AG carried out a proof-ofconcept beforehand for this solution with ARIS and webMethods, both integral parts of Software AG’s Digital Business Platform. Subsequently the core project team consisting of department employees and members of SOKA-BAU’s IT organization conceptually modeled the basis. The result: ARIS and webMethods are now strategically deployed at SOKA-BAU— ARIS for the complete development and documentation of functional and automation concept models, and webMethods as a platform for process execution and control.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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