Process Highway

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."

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.

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. style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>

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 style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>

What the CIOs should look for before they take the plunge: 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. Companies that do not have strong IT departments should look at a consultative approach to map their requirements and drive BPM initiatives. 5. You have a great opportunity here to extend your enterprise and get connected with your clients and vendors. Do it. 6. Choose the bouquet of solutions based on specific business requirements and ability to provide implementation and training services. 7. 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. style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> 8. 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. 9. BPM vendor and implementer should preferably be the same, because implementation knowledge in BPM is still very low unlike SAP. 10. Do not ignore or underestimate the hardware requirements while deploying the solutions. Deploy hardware generously.

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.

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.

Source: Dataquest