OBH Ingeniør Service

Background

OBH Ingeniørservice is one of Denmark’s largest suppliers of building reports and energy-performance labels. With a solution based on SOA (service-oriented architecture), OBH has succeeded in making the building inspectors’ work procedures more efficient and in giving their customers the possibility and access to follow the status of specific building reports.

Challenge

OBH Ingeniørservice is under the supervision of agencies which regularly check that the company observes the many rules and regulations governing the area of building inspection. This, combined with new requirements regarding digitalized procedures and service-based interaction with customers and various public and private stakeholders, was a major reason for OBH’s wish for a more agile IT infrastructure based on SOA.

The first challenge to handle was finding a way to make more efficient the receipt of orders for building reports in connection with house deals.

Solution

OBH’ s existing solution was based on Microsoft’s accounting system C5 which was no longer capable of handling and supporting some of the company’s business processes and the collaboration with agencies, real estate chains and insurance companies.

To ensure an effective IT infrastructure, which could be adapted to new tasks and in the long term minimize the development costs, we cooperated with OBH Ingeniørservice on creating the framework for the company’s IT architecture. It was decided that the well-functioning parts of the existing C5 solution, i.e. finance and reception of goods, would be maintained while service would be enabled and developed using Microsoft .NET

The SOA solution was implemented via an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which allows OBH Ingeniørservice to gradually change their existing IT architecture into a service-oriented architecture.

Advantages

Thanks to this solution OBH Ingeniørservice has made more efficient the building inspectors’ work procedures – including planning, document acquisition and report preparation. In addition, the new architecture has modified OBH’s business processes, improving their change-readiness markedly while also optimizing their cooperation with different private and public stakeholders.

At the same time, as a result of the new system, the real estate agents are now able to follow the status of building reports on individual houses. For example: has a building inspector been selected?, has an inspection been scheduled?, or has the job been delivered and invoiced? Finally, the SOA solution enables appointed building inspectors to obtain documents automatically from the public information server.

Thus, by implementing a service-oriented architecture, OBH has taken the first step towards complete digitalization and service-based interaction.  The purpose of investing in SOA was to get an agile IT infrastructure and this goal has been reached successfully. In the long term, the company may flexibly put together many different solution components and join various IT solutions across platforms and systems.