Three Full-Time Positions Saved with eAU Automation

The Customer

avitea GmbH and its subsidiary avitea Industrieservice GmbH are wholly owned subsidiaries of Hella GmbH & Co. KGaA, providing first-class staffing services and temporary employment for both commercial and highly skilled sectors.

Initial Situation & Challenge

Since January 1, 2023, employers are required to electronically verify with statutory health insurers whether an employee who has called in sick has a valid sick note. With approximately 2,500 employees, avitea faced a significantly increased administrative burden due to the introduction of the electronic sick note (eAU).

For recording sick reports, avitea uses various systems for different employee groups — systems that, at the time of the eAU’s introduction, could not be extended to support eAU queries.

avitea and avitea Industrieservice each use different ERP systems and time management software, neither of which supports automated eAU queries. Manual individual queries via the payroll software DATEV Lodas or via the web interface sv.net provided by the ITSG (the IT service center for statutory health insurance) would have resulted in considerable additional effort for the administration.

The goal was therefore to integrate the eAU query process into the existing process chain and provide an automated solution for both companies — without modifying the source systems or payroll reporting. avitea decided to develop a proprietary solution that automates and centralizes the eAU queries to statutory health insurers according to the specified procedure.

A particular challenge was the strictly scheduled project deadline: from design to certification and go-live, a timeframe of just six months had to be met.

Since avitea does not have its own development department, itemis AG was found as a strong partner.

itemis Approach & Solution

The procedure for querying the eAU is specified by the ITSG. Software that performs eAU queries must communicate with an interface provided by the ITSG. The particular challenge here was that the software is subject to a certification process by the ITSG. All technical and functional requirements defined by the ITSG had to be implemented and verified. itemis supported avitea with a flexible team and a solution-oriented approach to achieve certification, and was able to put the developed application into operation on time for the January 2023 payroll run.

To solve avitea’s challenge of automating the sick report process and the verification of electronic sick notes, itemis specified a microservice. This service is populated with sick reports from the surrounding systems via an ETL pipeline, carries out the queries to the statutory health insurers, and monitors them. Master data such as name, personnel number, insurance number, and health insurer are extracted from DATEV Lodas and kept up to date on a daily basis. The provision of master data from Lodas was a mandatory prerequisite for the system’s certification.

For communication with the statutory health insurers, the ITSG provides a COM server as a gateway.

Requests are sent to various data acceptance offices, with a separate request being created for each one.

A particular challenge was that the health insurers left room for interpretation in their responses, which the eAU query service had to handle. Especially after the initial go-live, such gaps became apparent — but thanks to the high test coverage, they were quickly captured as additional test cases and closed in the spirit of test-driven development.

For clearing exception cases, itemis provided a database interface that avitea can use to provide a dashboard for back-office employees. This now enables a quick response to functional and technical situations that can be resolved by back-office staff or through technical support.

Customer Benefit

By automating the sick report processes at avitea, an enormous amount of manual effort was saved — effort that would otherwise have been unmanageable. Today, thanks to itemis, the customer saves approximately three full-time positions that would otherwise have had to be created to handle the additional workload.

With the new solution, sick notes can be verified and administrative tasks automated. The processes have become significantly more efficient, which noticeably reduces the workload and also brings cost savings for the customer.