Bucap

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Bucap and Actian: A Winning Team

SUCCESS STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Bucap S.p.A. is a leading Italian company providing outsourced document archiving and management services to enterprises and public administrations for more than 25 years. Today, Bucap serves more than 280 customers and provides full outsourcing services covering any requirements of physical and digital archiving, traceability and data processing. Key facts about Bucap: 6 plants in Northern and Central Italy, 500 linear km of physically stored paper documents, 354 million documents stored in its database, 4,000 documents retrieved any day from their customers and 32,400 images digitalized per day.

Due the nature of its services, Bucap handles huge quantities of data which must be managed and stored in systems compliant with the requirements of high availability, accessibility and security. In order to guarantee the necessary service level, Bucap has gone through an in-depth evaluation of products available on the market and confirmed Ingres Database as the top choice.

CHALLENGE

Starting in 1995, after few years of industrial activity in the archiving and storing market, the management of Bucap realized that only a policy of investments in the IT would support the future growth of the company, thus providing a competitive advantage based on quality and efficiency of the services provided to its customers. This decision deeply affected all the internal management processes.

“In 1995 we evaluated different solutions available on the market in order to identify the one that best answered our requirements,” said Ruggero Rinaldi, currently General Manager at Bucap, and who was Director of Organization, Strategy and Development at that time. “After careful analysis of the features and performances of current available products, we chose Ingres, since it responded to our technical and economical requirements. We have recently reviewed the situation and decided to migrate to the latest version of Ingres, 9.2. The decision has been supported by the enhanced performances and features and also from Ingres being an open source product.”

The decision for Bucap to adopt Ingres was based on the fact that Ingres is a complete, full featured and open source RDBMS that can offer a suite of options for easy access to information. In order to gain even more flexibility, Bucap is using the OpenROAD languages to develop its own applications. The winning choice to build an internal development team, joint to the efficiency of the development tools, allows Bucap to quickly develop, adapt and customize the document management and back office software application, named Marica, to the continuously changing business and customer needs, thus gaining a competitive advantage on the market.

“The application is growing together with the company and to the business and is continuously adding new functionalities in order to manage even larger data volumes,” says Rinaldi. “Moreover, the fact that Ingres is multiplatform allows us to manage the information on the different systems used in our business.”

SOLUTION

Ingres: A Winning Choice
The decision to adopt Ingres has produced a number of positive impacts for Bucap:

• The possibility to in-source critical skills, like DBA (DataBase Administrator) and DBSA (DataBase System Administrator)
• Thanks to open source, the opportunity to test the new releases of the product in order to grow and consolidate the internal skills
• A very high degree of flexibility in managing the processes and adapting them to the ever changing business and customer needs
• High availability and robustness of the database to guarantee uninterrupted operations and customer services
• A simple and very reliable external interface to allow customers to directly access to their data

Thanks to this achievement, Bucap is recognized on the market today not only as a complete outsourcer for data archiving and storing, but also as the most specialized reference company in this market, due to the use of a customized, flexible and reliable document management system based on Ingres Database. During this period of time, Bucap and Actian have grown a strong partnership based on the quality of Ingres software and services and on the excellent Bucap skills.

The Web Portal Solution
“Prior to Ingres, all information managed by Bucap could be retrieved locally and remotely by our employees, our remote offices and even our customers but, due to the complexity and of the low reliability of the system, most of the queries were still performed through manual retrieval and physical mailing or fax of the document to the customer,” Rinaldi says. “Bucap wanted to offer a better quality and an up-to-date service to its customers and therefore created a service portal enabling customers to access all their documentation.”

Bucap needed the system to be scalable, reliable, highly available and easy to maintain, in order to be able to support all the business processes of storage, indexing, retrieving, and displaying of the documents at the service level agreement committed with the customers. The main goal achieved was to provide customers a portal to allow autonomous management of their data, documents and images, with a noticeable time and cost reduction of the whole process.

As a result, the customers realized that outsourcing service of document management to Bucap is cost effective and makes documents closer and more easily manageable compared with the traditional internal archiving. In June 2010, Bucap had 280 customers with more than 5,000 user accounts, demonstrating the consolidation of the customer portal and of its reliability.

RESULTS

The core of the Bucap service is the Ingres Database. The production environment is a server cluster guaranteeing nonstop services to the customers. A major advantage of Ingres Database is the easiness of administration compared to competitive products; it is very easy to administer, check, change and retrieve statistics out of the database. This easiness of operation is a key plus for Bucap, helping the company drastically reduce the number of resources dedicated to technical activities due to the reduced complexity of the maintenance.

Ingres Database contains and manages more than 354 Million of records with an average of 280 thousand transactions per day. It is a highly solicited database environment:

1. BUCAP personnel performs thousand transactions per day: new data input (50,000/day), query (4,000/day) and various reports
2. All customers, with more than 5,000 active accounts, can connect at any time to query for documents and retrieve documents and images

“We are very satisfied with the Ingres software, services and relationship,” continues Rinaldi. “We have been able to achieve very important goals and we are pleased to say that today, thanks to Actian and to Ingres Database, our business is based on solid ground and we are in a position to develop new and innovative projects to respond to the challenging business opportunities offered by our customers.”