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Sunil Gujral, VP for Technology, and Parminder Singh, GM for Technology, at
Wipro BPO Solutions, knew there was something critical missing from their
processes-a thread across the internal and external data fragments.
"There was lack of a unified view across business units," says Singh.
"There was a need to align information with the line managers at their
desktop and to look at employee productivity and seat utilization. Each unit had
their own data, but the rolled up data was taking too long to reach the business
users."
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"There was a need to align information with the line managers at their desktop and to look at employee productivity and seat utilization” |
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Parminder Singh, GM, for Technology, Wipro BPO Solutions |
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Max New York Life's VP for technology, Amit Kumar, carefully sums up the
work cut out for him: "The Policy Owner Servicing (POS) department was
concerned about the increased effort for servicing each customer request as it
was dependent on multiple disparate non-integrated IT systems. Right from
customer requests, signature verification, letter generation to file and folder
requests-everything was being handled manually. We wanted to track and monitor
various applications that were coming in from the perspective of turnaround
time, management, and faster service."
In all these cases, there comes a period in every organization's life, when
it needs an evolutionary change that looks at revamping the lifecycle of the
company's processes, looking for ways of improving them, and at the same time,
avoiding investment in the area of large, expensive, and risky new application
projects that have in many cases led to a disappointment in the past.
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"BPM is like a process highway, and the applications are like towns and cities on the way” |
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Punit Jain, VP, sales and marketing, Newgen |
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Alok Shende, director for ICT Practice, Frost and Sullivan, says that
business process management (BPM) traditionally incorporates knowledge
management, business intelligence and workflow. "Most implementations in
India have, however, been on the lines of workflow, where information is
scanned, documented and archived," he says.
Punit Jain, vice president, sales and marketing, Newgen, explains BPM more
graphically: "BPM is like a process highway, and the applications are like
towns and cities on the way. At any time there is a free flow of information
across the highway and any operation required can be performed by going to an
application, performing updates and transactions and coming back to the
highway." Gartner says that it has the potential to emerge as the highest
layer in the business application stack.
Document management systems, and workflow is the largest knowledge management
software and solutions market segment, accounting for 70% of the BPM market in
India. Enterprise portals are the second biggest revenue-generating segment,
followed by a nascent pure play knowledge management segment.
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BPM Simplified |
Business Process Management aims at a seamless integration of both automated and manual processes by creating more efficient workflows leading to a smooth process flow. With BPM-instead of having each application being in charge of a set of processes, and trying to subjugate adjacent applications to drive its processes-the control of the process is taken away from the individual applications. This makes them equal peers under the control of a BPM layer that drives the processes, delegating tasks or activities to the individual applications according to their strengths.
BPM's primary roots are in the process management capabilities of workflow tools including capabilities that are derived from process modeling, application integration, and process monitoring and rapid application development tools. Clearly, BPM is a synergy of all these on a single platform that manages the lifecycle of a process from definition, through deployment, execution, measurement, change, and re-deployment. |
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As elucidated further by Manoj Sinha, CEO, BISIL, "The goal of better
information delivery can be achieved by unifying the worlds of document
processing and transaction processing. This can be done by providing unified
document repositories and transaction databases that can be accessed with a web
browser from any location with Internet access."
According to Ram Menon, senior VP for worldwide marketing at TIBCO Software,
any BPM solution would include tools to analyze and model processes, a runtime
execution engine, process administration and monitoring, analysis of state data,
archiving with business intelligence and business rules-all that are designed
and implemented external to the business process for maximum flexibility and
reuse.
Is BPM your solution?
Today Wipro BPO Solutions uses the business intelligence tool ProClarity,
which is being rolled out across six cities, pulling data out of all the BPO
arms and escalating it to Delhi. In a fully integrated solution, there are links
to SAP's ERP model being used by Wipro. For large clients in the financial
space, processes use Newgen's Document Management and Workflow tools.
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The
Ten Commandments |
What the CIOs should look for
before they take the plunge:
- Make an operative business case
for the board/ CEO projecting BPM as an important productivity
driver for the future. Business users should be involved very
closely. According to a research, 70% of enterprises feel that
buy-in from the top management is the key challenge.
- Identify your core processes
that have to be improved and automated. Start with the business
process end state and clearly articulate the model through
process maps and flow charts before starting any work on it.
- In case you find this tough,
collaborate with a vendor or a consultant, who can help you
identify these processes. Look for historic and present
penetrations across business segments.
- Companies that do not have
strong IT departments should look at a consultative approach to
map their requirements and drive BPM initiatives.
- You have a great opportunity
here to extend your enterprise and get connected with your
clients and vendors. Do it.
- Choose the bouquet of solutions
based on specific business requirements and ability to provide
implementation and training services.
- A piecemeal approach may be
better. A big bang requires too much overhaul and big money
spend. Let the phased implementations justify the next round of
installations.
- Do a proof of concept with the
vendors after narrowing down on the tools that suit your
business. This helps in better understanding of your own.
- BPM vendor and implementer
should preferably be the same, because implementation knowledge
in BPM is still very low unlike SAP.
- Do not ignore or underestimate
the hardware requirements while deploying the solutions. Deploy
hardware generously.
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Max New York Life found its answers in Newgen's workflow solution called
MyFlow, which covers POS, new businesses and claims. Within a short period of
deployment, the turnaround time for client processing was reduced significantly.
The enterprise was ultimately looking at leveraged group/team knowledge, faster
response time, better decisions, enhanced customer services and overall employee
productivity-which they found.
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"Any BPM solution should include tools to analyze and model processes, a runtime execution engine, process administration and monitoring, analysis of state data, archiving with business intelligence and business rules” |
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Ram Menon, Sr VP for worldwide marketing, TIBCO Software |
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Even Tractors and Farm Equipment (TAFE) found its answers related to vendor
and customer connecting issues through BroadVision's BPM product.
R Geetha, head of IT at Indigo Lever, Shared Services, made sure that BPM was
incorporated in its efforts to ensure a smooth transition to offshore shared
services from Day 1 of 'live' operations. The company now benefits from
having a track record of each customer, transparency in operations, measurement
of KPI's, and SLA metrics, enabling ongoing performance improvements.
The bottom line
The scenario is clear: The CEO needs to improve business processes and
provide quicker response to customers by harmonizing processes with existing
infrastructures and technologies, such as ERP and CRM. On top of that, the CEO
does care about monitoring how the business is performing, measuring the
organizations ability to react to changes in the market and handling exceptions
quickly-and having a complete view of the organization.
The CIO has the task of making sure that the needs of the CEO are met fully
and quickly, with zero disruption to the business. The process problems have to
be sorted out effectively and BPM, if implemented smartly, can give the company
the quantum jump that it seeks.
A few of the industry verticals have been heavily focusing on BPM:
government, BFSI, IT and ITeS companies, manufacturing, hospitality, media and
the telecom. Vendors like Newgen, IBM, Microsoft, Fortune, TIBCO, Documentum,
File net, Oracle, Staffware, Wipro, Xerox, and Canon are offering products based
on the core process needs of these sectors.
As OVUM puts it "Businesses need to constantly adapt their processes,
yet they are often held back by static IT systems that aren't designed to
exploit future opportunities." So, if your process engine is getting
static, it may be time to step on the gas.
Jasmine Kaur
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