SIVI: "EC-Design has been an important tool for us for many years"

SIVI has been working with EC-Design, the digital message modeling tool, for over twenty-five years. As a Foundation and knowledge and advisory center in the field of digital business in the insurance industry, SIVI manages several important standards for the industry. Due to the complexity and diversity in their customers' needs, it is essential for SIVI to work with a tool that can support this reliably. After all these years, the capabilities that EC-Design offers still seamlessly align with these needs.

25 years working with EC-Design

Gerhard Gerritsen, Senior consultant at SIVI, explains how they work with EC-Design and why this tool has been their solution for message modeling for over twenty-five years:

'EC-Design enables us to meet the diverse needs of our customers by decoupling functionality and technology. Data definitions are separate from the syntax used to exchange data. This might sound complex, but it's actually quite simple. There are multiple technical syntaxes for data exchange, such as JSON, Edifact, and XML, and these can be decoupled from the functional messages that you ultimately generate. In our industry, one customer works with a different syntax than the next customer. EC-Design helps us exchange data with all our customers in a way that is easy to process for both parties while remaining 100% compatible.'

A smart methodology and reliable technology

'EC-Design is built on a smart development methodology. It's a layered system with multiple levels in the underlying technology. The first level consists of a data model with attributes and entities, level two covers transactions, level three messages, and level four consists of the technical schemas. The layered structure makes EC-Design highly flexible and transparent. This is important because when you want to exchange messages, you need a hierarchy and structure. With the push of a button, you can generate XML schemas in EC-Design, and when you change something at the highest level, it is immediately processed in the schemas. SIVI manages various standards for the insurance industry, with the most important standard containing twenty thousand elements that we deliver every month. EC-Design offers the best solution for this, making it an essential tool and resource for our organization.'

'Digitect, the supplier of EC-Design, continuously follows market developments and has consistently developed the tool further. As a result, they have become a partner for us with whom we explore and develop new possibilities together. They are a small agency with dedicated employees who are very accessible. If I have a problem, whether it's day or night, I can always call Frans and his colleagues.'