Iteris & Recovery
How the DevOps culture ensures agility, fosters relationships and creates better environments for businesses.
Introduction
The new configurations of the social environment, such as the urgency and emergency of innovation, have been demanding new corporate postures and a more agile culture able to provide faster solutions for the most diverse daily demands – a reality that companies and professionals responsible for leading and managing the IT area cannot ignore. In such situation, the act of strategically thinking, planning and executing tasks changes dramatically.
In a scenario marked by the urgency of an increasingly connected and mobile society, the DevOps culture becomes an assertive way for organizations of all sizes and types to be in line with the new cultural pressures of communicating and interacting through new interfaces.
To optimize the work of Dev and Ops teams, the DevOps culture creates a continuous flow of improvements and collaboration among multidisciplinary teams by automating processes and providing customers with value on an agile and organized basis, that is, the quality of the services delivered is three times higher.
The application of DevOps provided Recovery with agility, scalability and added value. After contracting Iteris, the company promptly noticed these changes in its internal processes. Iteris’ specialized team performed an assessment to identity the main areas that needed improvements, resulting in reduced delivery times and costs thanks to the optimization of team work and the automation of processes, translating into improved reliability and availability to generate new businesses.
Expertise in Debt Settlement
Part of Grupo Itaú and pioneering debt collection platform in Brazil, Recovery employs approximately 300 people and has been operating in the country for more than 20 years.
A major player in its market, Recovery is specialized in debt settlement and responsible for managing debts of more than 27 million customers through sustainable negotiations.
With more than 110 billion reais of default portfolios under management, Recovery is engaged in transforming debts into “fresh starts” by providing its customers with favorable conditions to rebuild their credit. With that in mind, it seeks to be in line with global technological trends.
Project Challenges
With a growing number of new businesses and demands in the past two years – a scenario that requires faster deliveries – Recovery’s executives were looking for new ways to improve the performance of the company’s technologies to ensure more efficient communications and services.
The company had to deal with factors that are common amid creative and innovative organizations experiencing a fast growth curve and that are seeking unique solutions in a digital transformation scenario. Additionally, yet during the pandemic, Recovery noticed that its internal systems needed a critical and thorough review to improve their performance. That is, processes were not in line with the projects’ requirements, negatively affecting deliveries and the operation of the business as a whole.
With a small team of IT professionals, including infrastructure and expertise, Recovery realized, after an internal technical recommendation, that it could significantly improve its IT environment working together with Iteris.
Iteris – a consulting firm operating in the market for 13 years, with more than 100 large clients and operations in Brazil and the United States – had the challenge of raising the bar of Recovery’s IT model to make it more efficient and, accordingly, positively impact on its business ecosystem.
Project Specific Features
The project started with the deployment of improvements in RaaS (Recovery-as-a-service), a complex system comprising a set of APIs that communicate with other partners during the negotiation of debts.
Iteris conducted a process to map modernization opportunities, with a complete view, including the architecture, application code and database. Additionally, it was also necessary to make adjustments to the deploy flow to expedite the deployment time of such modernization, focused on the agile culture principles.
The mapping process was the first step to reach Recovery’s main objective: accelerate RaaS’ communication volume and increase the organization’s business volume that often had to deal with system failures resulting from peaks of requests and closing of deals.
Recovery needed a system that responded effectively, regardless the volume of requests. After all, worse than the possibility of not having a customer is the real possibility of being about to close a new deal – or of having already closed it -, and to have a system that does not respond to the new demand.
Accordingly, Iteris developed and implemented some strategies and the company continued to gain value, influence and strength in its market.
The Solutions
The project at Recovery started with Iteris’ assessment, a leading methodology in the market thanks to its extremely high detailing level. The first step was to identify and trace the path for all the necessary improvements in RaaS – architecture, database, code and deploy pipeline -, with a precise diagnosis about its real performance. During this stage, Iteris’ specialized teams interviewed the areas, identified pain points and, based on the findings, developed a personalized plan according to the teams’ demands and needs, pointing out the best solutions.
After that, with a specialized squad and the backlog items duly tracked and prioritized, Iteris started to implement improvements to the system. During the second sprint, requests volume increased 10x. Three months after the project start, the quantity of servers decreased from 10 to only 2. Additionally, during the delivery of the application, there was no bug or issue thanks to Iteris’ Chapter of Software Quality.
As a result of Iteris’ agile development culture, the next step was to improve the DevOps culture at Recovery, automating processes and, consequently, reducing delivery times and the complexity of executions by applying the market’s best practices and deploying and improving tools. DevOps architects not only deployed the tools but also trained Recovery’s team to maintain and evolve processes and pipelines.
With these solutions, Recovery’s infrastructure was optimized with processes and cutting-edge technology, generating added value to the business, productivity gains and the development of contingency plans to prevent emerging issues from negatively affecting the evolution of processes.
The Results
With the improvements made to the RaaS and the DevOps culture, Iteris has facilitated Recovery’s internal processes. The joint collaboration between the two companies translated into productivity gains, that is: scalability, agility, flexibility, reliability, and innovation in the services provided.
In less than one year, Iteris’ specialists implemented improvements to the systems as a whole and, with the automation of processes, achieved a significant cost reduction, time saving (270 days) with labor force, in addition to increasing RaaS’ ROI as a result of the growth in the volume of operations and reduced costs with its infrastructure.
Prior to the improvements, processes were performed on a manual basis, with longer delivery times. After the implementation of the new system, Recovery has noticed that agility is one of the main factors, not to mention the significant reduction in the number of bugs.
With the fewer manual, human interventions in the production environments, data-related risks were significantly minimized. Today, there’s a governance on what should come first, in addition to availability for all these demands, a factor that reflected on the end, with the company’s business partners noticing time reduction and processes in line with their business timing, resulting in more deals closed.
It’s also clear that Recovery has joined the digital transformation environment: now, its systems can respond to the volatility of the modern world.
“The technological framework Iteris has been helping us build is the foundation of Recovery’s future. The DevOps culture helps us promptly meet bug-related demands and respond faster, regardless it’s a recurring or a new event. All these improvements have been helping us improve the quality and delivery of our services. We believe that the decision of investing on a reliable support to keep up to date on the market’s technological innovations is a one-way journey,” says Wendel Santos, Head of Information Technology at Grupo Recovery.
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