Flexdoc achieves scaling, increased productivity, and cost savings with Google Cloud
About Flexdoc
Flexdoc, a company specializing in process automation, data and document validation, and document image processing systems, helps accelerate its customers’ growth by deploying smart, manageable flows.
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About Sauter
Sauter is a startup whose mission is to be a tech consultancy firm with a difference. In partnership with its customers, it aims to drive digital transformation in a simple, agile, and personalized way.
With Sauter’s support and Google Cloud’s APIs and tools, Flexdoc expanded its data processing capacity and started using load balancing.
Results
- Increased speed for developing new products
- Improved data extraction performance
- Positive impact on team productivity thanks to activity automation
100x increase in computing power
Flexdoc processes image-based documents. The company currently serves businesses from the financial segment, such as banks and insurance companies, focusing on financial flows, processing of checks and securities, the opening of checking accounts, loans, and real estate flows. With 270 employees, Flexdoc is headquartered in Brasília and has a branch in São Paulo.
One of Flexdoc’s differentiators is its comprehensive solutions, since besides handling documents, it offers services from image-capturing to electronic signatures, which come at the end of the transaction.
As it provides services to seven of Brazil’s largest financial institutions, Flexdoc was facing a few technical challenges. In March 2021, one of those banking corporations introduced a plan to create a new digital bank. However, as its large customer base did not yet have checking accounts, the average daily processing volume was going to increase from 30,000 to 300,000 accounts.
It was then, despite having an existing structure hosted in another cloud provider, that Flexdoc realized it would need to address that demand and find another service provider. The goal was finding apps and tools capable of adequately meeting the company’s needs, and market research led it to choose Google Cloud.
“We ran tests on other platforms. However, the main factor that led us to Google Cloud was the computer vision APIs. We compared them thoroughly with the competition and found that the performance of Google’s APIs was superior,” says Carlos Flávio de Souza, Flexdoc’s Head of Innovation.
A new journey in the public cloud
To implement the plan and migrate, the company was supported by Sauter throughout the migration period. The teams worked in an integrated way, cutting red tape for every process—a key factor for the project’s feasibility.
“It took us less than five days to complete the deployment after the first contact, and the switch happened during production. We migrated our entire infrastructure from the boardroom of one of our main customers in four hours. Sauter’s support was crucial to make that happen.”
—Carlos Flávio de Souza, Head of Innovation, FlexdocTo ensure Google Cloud’s resources sufficed to meet its most pressing needs, Flexdoc turned to Cloud Load Balancing and was pleasantly surprised. According to the company, this solution, which handles load balancing and automatic scaling, was a watershed, since it operates like a router, capturing every transaction and sending them to servers that handle processing.
Another factor in the migration’s success was the speed and technical expertise of the professionals from Sauter and Flexdoc monitoring the journey to Google Cloud. The teams’ agility and connection were seen as major assets.
“The migration phase, which happened during production, was extremely critical as we had to consider the context. Every time the bank, our customer, runs a campaign, this can have a direct impact on Flexdoc’s performance. That’s why we proceeded cautiously, watching to see what the circumstances would be,” says Zeca Branco, Sauter’s Head of Operations.
Infrastructure usability and favorable results
The new infrastructure in Google Cloud hosts all of Flexdoc’s virtual machines and servers. The high availability of the Cloud SQL database service, with its high-speed repository, and especially the computing vision apps of Vision AI have transformed data extraction, which is now more comprehensive and performs better.
“We are still monitoring and identifying some opportunities for Flexdoc. The goal is to keep working to ensure the company can scale in a way that is beneficial and sustainable.”
—Zeca Branco, Head of Operations, SauterThe scaling of computing power—which increased 100x, API performance, the speed new products are developed at, and the ability to control expenses are part of the company’s new daily routine. Server idleness was also considerably reduced, leading to financial benefits for the company.
Moreover, employee productivity is targeted at specific actions, as they no longer need to worry about constantly provisioning and shutting down machines. They now have automation to do that for them.
“Some days we process 10,000 accounts. On others, due to institutions’ promotional campaigns, we jump to hundreds of thousands of accounts. This means we have scalability. The redundancy and the ability to work with zones from different databases help improve the end result.”
—Carlos Flávio de Souza, Head of Innovation, FlexdocRegarding plans for the future, the company expects to increase its data volume even further. Therefore, Flexdoc keeps monitoring customer demands to create and implement other business flows, supported by its partnership with Sauter and Google Cloud’s infrastructure.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Flexdoc
Flexdoc, a company specializing in process automation, data and document validation, and document image processing systems, helps accelerate its customers’ growth by deploying smart, manageable flows.
About Sauter
Sauter is a startup whose mission is to be a tech consultancy firm with a difference. In partnership with its customers, it aims to drive digital transformation in a simple, agile, and personalized way.