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.

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.

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.

Jasmine Kaur