In VTB Bank the solution for the automated processing, input and registration is let into SDO of Requirements and Orders of tax authorities

2020

Start of the solution for the automated processing, input and registration in SDO of Requirements and Orders of tax authorities

In VTB Bank business solution for the automated processing, input and registration in the System of Documentary Providing (SDP) of Requirements and Orders of the tax authorities coming to Bank from tax authorities in an unformalized type is developed and brought into commercial operation. On July 24, 2020 the InterTrust company reported about it.

The system of documentary providing VTB Bank is developed by InterTrust Company based on the Corporate information system of electronic document management and office-work of CompanyMedia.

Before the implementation automated the solutions received on electronic channels files of Requirements and Instructions were printed, decomposed on pairs (Instructions are annexes to Requirements), were registered in SDO, were scanned, and in a type the scan images took place in registration cards of a system.

Workers spent more than a half of the working day therefore on execution the documents which arrived in the morning got only by the end of the working day only for printout and manual selection of pairs.

Besides, printout of documents manually required additional manual reconciliation of number of the received and printed documents.

For automation of this process the application based on the software package ABBYY FlexiCapture and SDO-Integrator using the application programming interface (CMJ-REST API) supported by all modules SDO was developed.

The developed application allowed to refuse printing of the documents of the tax authorities sent to Bank in an unformalized type received on electronic communication channels; automate process of selection of Requirements and Instructions, fillings of attributes of a registration card, registration and putting down of a registration stamp on documents.

Implementation automated resheniyeya allowed Bank to save over 4 tons of paper in annually and also to reduce several times transmission time of documents for execution.

Implementation of technology of paperless preparation of documents for meetings of collegiate organs

On June 1, 2020 it became known that the VTB bank completed one more stage of transition to completely paperless managerial document flow – implemented the updated module "SDO-Zasedaniya" in the system of documentary providing (SDP) of bank. This module assumes a possibility of preparation and holding meetings of collegiate organs of bank: committees, the commissions, councils, etc., completely in a digital format.

In particular, are automated:

• preliminary preparation of documents about informing the secretary on readiness of materials and their return if necessary to completion;
• approval of the documents created at different stages of business process;
• vote on the questions included in the agenda and assurance of bulletins the electronic signature;
• execution of the minutes in electronic form with putting down of electronic signatures of the chairman and secretary of collegiate organ;
• creation of instructions under the protocol and statements from it;
• control of execution of the decisions made at a meeting of collegiate organ.

In the period of a pandemic of a coronavirus and transition to remote work it is especially important to banks to have a possibility of discussion of questions and decision making in an online format. The module allows without decrease in efficiency because of remote work to prepare for meetings, to fix the decisions made at them and to provide control of their implementation.

Implementation of this system is a part of strategy implementation of VTB which, in particular, assumes transition to 100% to digital internal document flow by 2022.

The module "SDO-Zasedaniya" is a part of a system of documentary providing Bank based on domestic applied software CompanyMedia JSC InterTrust Company and is completely integrated with other modules and services of a system.

Possibility of remote work for employees using mobile devices

On April 16, 2020 it became known that the VTB Bank gave an opportunity of remote work for the employees using mobile devices. In the conditions of a quarantine in the mode of remote work management of Bank had an opportunity of acceptance and delivery of management decisions and control of their execution using tablet devices in the interface of the mobile workplace (MW).

As it was reported, the mobile workplace developed for the system of documentary providing bank (SDO) specialists of the company "INTERTRUST", provides an opportunity for work with documents of modules SDO, creations of resolutions, instructions, performance reports, approvals of documents, votes according to bulletins of meetings.

On the basis of an informative part of documents in the form of the attached files and details of documents and also like a task in connection with the document the user or his assistant makes the decision which is transferred to SDO according to the document. At the same time files open only the built-in means without a possibility of information transfer to other applications, printing, copyings in a clipboard, sendings by e-mail. Thus, and in a remote operation mode SDO continues to remain the entrusted environment of interaction of employees of the bank within different business processes.

During the work in MRM the user has opportunities to use the screen keyboard, to create graphic comments (a finger or the stylus), to write audio-comments.

The user of MRM has an opportunity for work offline, without permanent connection to the server. At connection to the Internet at the command of the User synchronization of data with the server is performed.

At accomplishment of certain transactions the functionality of formation of the electronic signature of the owner Ustroystva or verification of the existing electronic signature is caused.

Separately it should be noted possibilities of carrying out in the remote mode of meetings of collegiate organs. At the same time the user of MRM receives materials of meetings, including the agenda, agenda questions, drafts of solutions on questions, directives, additional materials for viewing; participates in vote concerning the agenda and formation of the bulletin; receives the minutes.

In the last several months specialists of INTERTRUST company conducted work on upgrade of MRM. Reliability of work was increased, the speed of synchronization of MRM is increased, for the updated MRM the system of pro-active monitoring and operational identification of problems is unrolled. Nonfunctional characteristics are improved that allowed to provide in a short time readiness of infrastructure for connection more than 1500 users.

From functional expansions and improvements it should be noted support of electronic approval of powers of attorney, signing outgoing, approval on MRM of purchase and economic agreements. Function of additional charge of investments "on the fly", for acceleration of the general lock-up time is also provided, in particular, "massive" these^[1].

2019: End of the first stage of stress testing of SDO

On September 20, 2019 the InterTrust company reported that it completed the first stage of stress testing of the system of documentary providing (SDP) of VTB Bank in the environment which is completely reproducing real scenarios of use of a system in Bank. Testing was held on the equipment of Huawei — a full range of the technical infrastructure including a server farm, a data network and a storage system based on solid state drives.

According to the company, results of testing showed the high performance of a system in the high-loaded operation mode. Also in the course of tests the architecture of distribution of data was investigated — these applications were consolidated on one storage system for optimization of use of resources and performance improvement and reliability.

SDO is the difficult, interconnected software package providing support of key management processes in Bank due to providing the general services of documentation, electronic interaction, analytics. Correctly built documentary providing accelerates acceptance of management decisions, does the procedure of their acceptance transparent and controlled, increasing quality of management and enhancing competitiveness of bank. If the decision is made, then it is performed, and is strict according to the adopted regulations — it provides SDO. Criticality for Bank of processes which are supported by SDO demands from the system of high performance, fault tolerance, flexible scaling. Continuous development, complication of a system, change in architecture, replacement of the outdate technologies by modern requires obligatory testing of all a component, including, in respect of providing requirements of continued operation in the high-loaded operation modes.

Characteristics of operation of SDO in Bank are the large number of the connected users (for September, 2019 65,000), the large volume of at the same time processed documents, high requirements to access control to documents. Parameters of operation have the potential of multiple increase in connection with the planned expansion of Bank.

For September, 2019 in Bank a transfer of SDO on the basic components which are not containing the proprietary software and, in particular, import-independent components is made.

With respect thereto in Bank stress testing for the updated architecture of SDO was planned and held.

Testing was held for achievement of the following purposes:

• identification of exact parameters of a horizontal and vertical sayzing of servers under a profile of loading of Bank;
• check of resistance to stress of the software product;
• check of fault tolerance of components in the conditions of a high load;
• determination of entropy rate of intercluster interaction at horizontal scaling;
• check of scaling of requests for reading when using the platform balancer. Determination of coefficient of horizontal scaling of all catch and system components;
• determination of the greatest possible hardware parameters of servers of different functional purpose (vertical scaling);
• application load profile research of technical infrastructure and approximation of the received results for development planning of an information system;
• research of impact of consolidation of data of the application on one storage system for resource optimization and reliability augmentation and performance.

Often, when stress testing of electronic document management systems is held for demonstration of high performance, speeds of system operation by solution providers are used the simplified scenarios imitating fast finding, opening of cards of documents which do not contain communications with other documents, lifecycle history, without calculation of access rights and other vremyazatratny factors. Reduced models of tests show record response time of a system even at significant increase in number of users and documents.

Stress testing of SDO pursued first of all the aim of the most exact reproduction of real utilization properties. For this purpose within a month statistics of activities of users and background work of all services of a system using a permanent monitoring system of work of SDO gathered. Statistical data on document flows were adjusted (together with the owner of process) taking into account the predicted growth. On the basis of these data the testing methodology which is completely reproducing all really proceeding processes in a system was developed. At the test stand the most widespread business activities and also the most vremyaemky requests according to collected statistics were repeated. Performance of work of all components of a system taking into account operations on calculation of access rights of users to system objects, opening of documents with difficult branched hierarchy, a large number of communications was tested. Loading at full-text search was imitated and many other things. These applications were consolidated on a single system of storage of Huawei OceanStor Dorado 6000 V3, computing powers were located on the building Huawei E9000 server block system, data were transferred on network of transfer based on switches of level of DPC of Huawei of the CE series. In the course of the researches the round-the-clock observation of all indicators of system operation with a possibility of creation of diagrams and creations of tabular reports was made for the subsequent analysis including historical data.

Profile of stress testing of Bank

• the number of the registered users: 65000 with increase to 150000;
• frequency of an input (authentication) of users in a system: 50 thousand/hour;
• the number of the users who are at the same time working in a system: 10000;
• the number of the registered documents: 10 million/year;
• volume of files of investments: 1 Tb / year;
• number of processes of approval of documents: 1.5 million/year;
• number of visas of participants of approval: 7.5 million/year;
• quantity of resolutions/instructions: 15 million/year;
• number of reports on resolutions/instructions: 15 million/year;
• quantity of the user tasks: 7 million.

As storage system the high-performance storage system of Huawei OceanStor Dorado 6000 V3 with 117 SSD disks 3.6 TB each more than 300 TB was used. Delays at accomplishment of user queries seldom exceeded 1 ms that significantly accelerated accomplishment of standard and non-standard requests. High speed of work of a disk subsystem of the application resulted in need of an additional research for identification of types of load of operation of application of technical infrastructure by the analysis of historical data — transactions of the application were executed many times quicker and borrowed smaller time is essential. Thus, thanks to the received results of a research, there was an opportunity more flexibly and precisely to plan development of a system according to specific requirements to a hardware platform.

The following components in terms of scaling were checked:

• server of the application (CMJ). Check of limits of vertical scaling (resources on criticality degree: quantity of cores and frequency, volume of OZU). Support of horizontal scaling for the account duplication of functional and identical services and balancing between them;
• client's server (Web GUI). Check of limits of vertical and horizontal scaling;
• file storage (FS). Check of limits of vertical scaling (resources on criticality degree: network transmission capacity, speed of disks). Support of horizontal scaling at the expense of a distributed file system (CEPH, GLUSTERFS);
• database (PostgreSQL). Check of limits of vertical scaling (resources on criticality degree: volume of OZU, speed of disks, quantity of cores and frequency). Support of horizontal scaling — scaling of the reading loading on slave-servers, scaling of the writing loading by the principle of division into functional modules;
• message broker (Apache Artemis). Check of limits of vertical and horizontal scaling;
• server of search (Apache Solr). Check of limits of vertical and horizontal scaling.

At formalistic approach to stress testing (when there is no other purposes except high-speed performance demonstration) tests do not reveal working capacity problems. In our case identification of possible problems was one of the main tasks during stress testing. And, as it was supposed, a number of problems with performance was revealed and eliminated. In particular:

• falling of capacity of a cache of the application server at an invalidation on a large number of copies of applications in a cluster;
• formation of "a bottle neck" on transaction of document registration with increase in number of points of registration (from 500 on one server);
• formation of "a bottle neck" at increase in number of simultaneous authorizations on one server (from 1000 and above);
• reduction of capacity of service of business logic at intensive logging of requests to DBMS.

After elimination of performance concerns stress testing showed the next average times of standard transactions of work in the SDO system with relational storage on a profile of Bank:

• authorization of the user in a system — 400 ms;
• viewing course of execution on average — 2.5 s;
• creation of a registration and control card — 1.4 s;
• registration of a registration and control card — 600 ms;
• creation of the resolution — 1.0 s.

Based on the held stress testing of SDO of VTB Bank the following conclusions are drawn:

• a system behaves significantly better on operating systems of the Linux family;
• the stated principles of ensuring fault tolerance work at the level of each component in the "hot" mode. Inactivation a component of a system remains imperceptible for the user (the administrator proactively fixes problems);
• key component — the service of business logic (accepting user queries) has "mirror" horizontal scaling, almost linear scaling of capacity with a growth of number of copies;
• the expected values of capacity of a system at increase in number of users and, as a result, numbers of the started scenarios are provided with the stated characteristics of scaling;
• the most optimal sayzing of service business of logic — 8 vCPU on 1200 simultaneous users and 1.5 vCPU DBMS;
• consolidation of data of the application on a single system of data storage significantly increases performance and reliability of the application and increases scalability;
• use of a complex of technical infrastructure of Huawei yielded good results in terms of ensuring necessary utilization properties of a system.^[2]

2016: Start in the operation "SDO-Zakupki"

On December 21, 2016 it became known of start in operation in VTB bank technology IT infrastructure for the process optimization of preparation and document creation necessary for holding a procedure of purchases. Specialists of the company developed InterTrust, it received the name "SDO-Zakupki" ("The system of documentary providing – Purchases"). At the heart of the implemented solution — the fourth version EDMS CompanyMedia^[3].

Project Tasks

As premises by the beginning of the project requirements of bank for optimization and automation of purchasing activity and the related business processes, implementation of the updated mechanisms of purchasing activity for the purpose of increase in efficiency of purchases and cost reduction on maintenance of purchasing activity served. When implementing the project considered specifics of legislative procurement control — the bank performs purchasing activity within Federal law No. 223-FZ "About purchases of goods, works, services as separate types of legal entities". According to the law, the company from shares of the state participation of 50% are also more obliged to publish data on the planned and conducted procurements on the uniform portal of state procurements and also on electronic marketplaces.

Building of office of bank

The SDO-Zakupki system is applied to end-to-end automation of all stages of purchasing activity, including collecting and approval of requests in bank, formation and the publication of packets of procurement documentation, implementation of procedures of purchases, the choice of partners and preparation of agreements with suppliers.

Work in the project

During the project a number of integration tasks is solved. One of them — data exchange between the implemented technology and the budgeting system applied in bank - own development of VTB.

The mechanism of automatic formation of requests in "SDO-Zakupki" on the basis of the annual plan created in a budgeting system is created. From the solution "SDO-Zakupki" data on the agreements signed based on complete procurement procedures are unloaded.

Bilateral interaction between "SDO-Zakupki" and "Single electronic trading platform" on which the special section for placement of purchases of the companies of VTB Group is created is organized.

As a part of the solution the specialized module by means of which work of the commission on purchases — collegiate organ of bank is automated. The specialized module serves for automation of preparation and carrying out commission sessions, control of execution of solutions. Participants of the commission had an opportunity of remote participation in its work with use of tablet devices. Implementation of the module helped to reduce the average time of holding a meeting more than by 50% — from 4 to 1.5-2 o'clock.

Project Results

Compliance to the current legislation was an important, but not the only task which needed to be solved during the project. Thanks to the implemented solution we managed to pass to electronic document management in the field of purchases, to optimize all business process. On paper carriers there were only agreements with partners, and all internal document flow is conducted in a system using the electronic signature. It significantly saves time of all categories of users — initiators of purchase, experts of the performing divisions, specialists of financial and legal departments, the general bookkeeping department of bank, a security service and other divisions participating in purchasing activity. Considerably also work of the commission on purchases which heads of the high level enter became simpler. The possibility of mobile work with documents and fixing of provisional solutions concerning meetings using mobile devices is provided to them. Christina Zemlyanskaya, expert of department of the organization of purchases of management of the analysis and cost control of VTB

In a system users of head office and regional network VTB work.

Notes