Healthcare is an industry characterized by a labyrinth of compliance mandates. Participants within the industry are subject to a multitude of regulations and must ensure compliance with all relevant regulations – state or federal, to avoid potential penalties. However, among all the compliance requirements, transition to ICD-10 (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Version 10) is the current topmost concern for healthcare organizations. The transition-involving a massive restructuring of the United State’s medical coding system, has put immense pressure on payer as well as provider organizations to make enormous cost and time investments to completely overhaul their business processes.
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid’s (CMS) recently announced decision to delay the ICD-10 implementation deadline (from Oct. 1, 2013 to Oct. 1, 2014), brought some temporary relief to the panic-stricken healthcare industry. Nonetheless, the challenge still remains for healthcare organizations to integrate ICD-10 into their business strategy.
For health plans, ICD-10 calls for a basal shift in their IT and business strategy. Some payers gauge ICD-10 as simply an IT systems upgrade. Such organizations might find themselves overwhelmed by the depth of impact that this new set of codes might have. Others look at ICD-10 as a huge financial burden and are seeking ways to leverage their existing IT and business framework, to lessen this burden. As they say, there’s always a positive side to everything, so is there to ICD-10. Taking into account the business value that ICD-10 would bring to payers in the form of more accurate payments, fewer rejected claims, reduced fraudulent claims, improved member satisfaction, etc., it can certainly be looked at as a potential differentiator for early adopters. An efficient Business Process Management (BPM) platform can catalyze ICD-10 transition, while reducing operational and implementation costs. As a continuous process improvement platform, BPM can prepare health plans to to align people, processes and systems to ensure a smooth conversion. So… isn’t ICD-10 just a decision away?
Bio: Garima is part of the Marketing team at Newgen Software.
Traditionally, small parts of a process (work-step/s) have been performed by different workers who add some value at each work-step. However, increasing automation has led to reducing of the repetitive work and work-steps involve very little value addition from each worker. To keep work interesting and meaningful for a knowledge worker, and to enhance efficiencies, each knowledge worker is expected to perform the task end-to-end. This requires knowledge workers to collaborate in both structured and ad-hoc manner depending on how the case shapes up. Typical “case management” application areas include a benefits claim processing, an investigation by a government agency or a loan request processing.
“Case Management” includes usage of content, collaboration and support for dynamic work allocation. Within such cases, exceptions are unpredictable and rather become the norm. Such “ cases” can only be visualized and modeled into a process after they are completed. Therefore, to successfully manage the “Case”, along with the Content Management tools, the information worker also requires social/collaboration tools for the ad hoc work, and tools like BPM, and business rules for managing structured work.
Bio: Rohit Thakur is Senior Manager-Marketing, at Newgen Software
The demands on the Finance and Accounting (F&A) function in business organizations are significant, with constant pressures to achieve process compliance and increase business efficiency and agility, while also driving down transactional costs.
As a result, finance operations demand a transformational approach with higher automation, better process visibility and enhanced business agility. A Business Process Management (BPM) solution is the right tool for finance functions seeking not just cost savings but also process efficiencies and compliance, as well as improved management reporting. BPM enables business organizations to model, automate, manage, and optimize their F&A procedures.
Newgen’s BPM-based F&A solutions help clients overcome the problems posed by manual systems, by enabling continuous streamlining of processes in order to improve efficiency, control, compliance, and risk mitigation, to meet the challenges of a highly volatile business environment.
Newgen’s BPM suite has been recognized by top analyst firms. Two Newgen clients- Unilever and Future Group were declared winners of the 2011 Excellence Awards for Finance & Accounting (F&A) Transformation through Shared Services. While Unilever Shared Service (erstwhile Indigo) was recognized under the category of Excellence in Servicing Clients in the Sub-continent, the Future Group Shared Service won the award for Excellence in Strategy towards Financial Transformation.
Newgen’s solutions are designed to automate a wide range of F&A processes, such as accounts payables, receivables and fixed assets, general ledger and policy owner servicing, etc. Newgen helps clients to improve operational effectiveness while allowing them to leverage their existing technology investments. Business benefits delivered to the client by Newgen’s F&A solutions include:
Bio: Garima is part of the Marketing team at Newgen Software.
With increased focus on transparency, compliances and better services within a specified period of time, more and more government departments are realizing the need for investing in their IT Infrastructure. Government departments, specially the customer centric ones, such as Transport, Health, Passport, and MNREGA, are constantly faced with an uphill task of managing huge volumes of documents and processes. These departments need a system that can help them deliver citizen centric services to the people at a faster pace, with improved transparency and accountability.
Large public sector enterprises have already taken steps towards embracing e-Governance and Digitization. There are examples of organizations such as DMRC – very recently they have adopted a SaaS-based Document Management System, seeing digitization as the need of the Hour.
There are multiple other examples where Newgen has helped organization such as Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Gujarat Industries Power Company Ltd, Madhya Pradesh Transport Department, Estate Office Chandigarh, Gujarat State Fertilizers and Chemicals, LIC of India, and many public sector banks to realize their objective of a ‘Less Paper Office’ through its award winning end to end document management and process automation solutions.
If technology has enabled us to go paperless and achieve better governance there is no reason why organizations should not go with it.
Name: Neeraj Bio: Neeraj Koli is part of the Global Business Development team at Newgen, and is responsible for the APAC Banking market.
Last night I participated in a webinar titled “Banking Transformation Needs Smart Automation”. The webinar highlighted BPM and ECM as catalysts for financial services transformation and how business benefits could be accrued from their implementation. The speakers included Derek Miers, Principal Analyst of Forrester Research and Mridul Sharma, Senior Vice President, Solution Delivery Team, IndusInd Bank and Ritesh Verma, Head, CoE Banking Practice.
Mr. Derek Miers talked about “Driving Transformation in Financial Services.” He began by stating that most organizations today are in the midst of one of the most disruptive shifts in economic history. The shift has been from producers and those who hold capital to consumers. Consumers he said had a plethora of choices today and even more so in the finance and banking industry. He went on discuss the gradual transition from the way banking services were delivered on paper to the 360 degree approach that is followed today. He stressed on the fact that since customers had so many choices, the greatest differentiator was how customer experience was delivered to customers. If customers were dissatisfied, they would invariably jump ship. To keep in tune with customer needs, organizations had to evolve and transform themselves. Mr. Miers spoke about how processes were at the center of this transformation from Traditional Line Management to Processes and Services Management. He argued that this did not warrant a Band-aid approach where specific systems or parts of the organization were changed but more like a “Wellness Program” which brings overall vitality, rejuvenation and business transformation. He felt that customer centricity should become the default behavior of the organization and especially its front line.
This approach reminded me of the term “Big Process” that I read in an article by Connie Moore titled “Embrace Big Process Thinking” where she said, “Big Process is when senior-most business and technology leaders embrace business process change by shifting the organization’s focus from isolated BPM and process improvement projects to a sustainable, enterprise-wide business process transformation program that is then supported and driven by top executives.” I think this aligns perfectly with what Derek was trying to explain.
Derek went on to elaborate on how organizations should build their transformation plan by focusing on outcomes and working backwards to the processes it needs to deliver that outcome. He concluded by highlighting that organizations should look at this as an opportunity to shine and take the lead rather than waiting for change to happen.
Mridul Sharma then took the speaker’s role and discussed how Newgen’s BPM solution helped the bank to improve processes, reduce turn-around-times, foster transparency and lay the foundation for a paperless and green office.
Ritesh Verma concluded the presentation session by discussing Newgen’s capabilities in BPM and ECM and stressing on how Newgen is in the business of transforming banks. He went on to point out how Newgen has become a key enabler for fast growing banks. He also enumerated the company’s achievements in the BFS industry and its pedigree of 850+ installations across 45 countries. He concluded by showcasing the number of clients Newgen has worked with and how it has helped 119 banks across the globe to achieve their business goals.
The webinar was wrapped up by a Question and Answer round where participants interacted with the key speakers.
Name: Imroz Adeeb
Bio: Imroz is Associate Manager - Corporate Communications at Newgen Software.
In last 4 months, I had the fortune of meeting some top leaders in the Indian banking industry including some CMDs and EDs of large public sector banks. One common subject that all these people agreed and spoke about was that the use of Information and Communication Technology is the only way to take a quantum jump and attain the objective of bringing all unbanked citizens under their umbrella.
Indian Banking industry survived the global economic crisis and remained the back bone of growing Indian economy because of its robust checks and balances within the system. Now with such strong fundamentals in place, it is looking at its growth in the same way as the telecom industry did in recent past in India.
Drawing an analogy, the growth of telecom industry in India has been possible because the industry had the vision of increasing the tele-density in rural India unleashing the power of billion+ people. This was made possible because of high usage of Information and Communication Technology by the industry. Today the whole of India is enjoying the benefits by getting very low usage rates and many more facilities coming forth.
In a similar way, the banking industry is targeting the unbanked people of rural India and bringing them within the banking system through financial inclusion. Information and Communication Technology is the only tool which bankers are banking upon to bring about a telecom industry like renaissance. Who knows the whole of Indian population might gain through reduced interest rates on loan and more credit facility for working capital to bring about capital growth of the nation by unearthing the huge potential of unbanked money laying in Rural India.
Telecom like scams are a big NO NO in this transformation process …
Name: Sameer
Bio: Sameer is Head - Global Business Development at Newgen software Technologies Ltd.
Creating software from business requirements or walking on the water is very easy if both are frozen. No doubt one of the major challenges software companies face is to manage change during the coding phase. A good number of linear and iterative software development model concepts are available in the market. Even though these orthodox Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) models have good success rates of providing satisfactory software solutions, most of them fail to provide the solution in time.
More often than not, this happens because of the unforeseen changes or the new requirements which were not included in the requirement documents. Also, this kind of change requests make the entire project susceptible to potential risks as the partially built software may decline the newly suggested changes which are technically infeasible.
Unlike any other software, a BPM software solution always expects to have a lot of change requests during the coding phase. In fact, it will not be an exaggeration to say that the change requests during the implementation phase, best capture all the non-functional requirements for any BPM solution. A BPM solution never works in silos and on the contrary it gets all the individual business systems together on a single platform so that they can work collaboratively. Extensive integrations, rich GUI, user-friendly look and feel, adherence to branding guidelines on the screen (fonts, logos etc.) are some of the requirements which usually come up during the implementation phase. Now this is a challenge for all the BPM vendors and implementers to welcome all those changes and incorporate them in the solution without extending the project delivery time.
All the top notch BPM tools, available in the market are already over saturated with functionalities and features.
So, the discriminating factor between any two leading BPM vendors is not the BPM tool kit any more but their capability to implement the BPM solution in lesser time by addressing all the last minute changes.
All the BPM vendors use their own techniques and procedures for implementation. Newgen Software is not an exception. We have started using the Prototyping model for the BPM solution development which is by the way the most praised and the least followed method across the globe. Prototyping is highly praised because it ensures faster project delivery than any other methods and is least followed because it demands incorporating the continuously evolving solution requirements while developing the solution. The solution developed with available requirements is shown to the client for feedback. The client usually gets an early idea of how the solution will look like in real. Client feedback forms the basis for the requirements for the second version of the solution. After a number of iterations between the client and the development team, the solution becomes ready to be deployed. However, the process is not as easy as it sounds. It requires extensive domain knowledge of developing same kind of business solutions which bring the efforts to perfection in quick time.
Newgen has its ingenious methods and approaches for the prototyping model. Very recently, we have used this technique successfully for a leading European bank. We have fully automated 7 processes in 18 months and the solution has been deployed across 3 countries with 3 separate document management system implementation. So, the Newgen’s Prototyping model speaks for itself. Below is a generic overview of the model:
By using the Prototyping model, allows Newgen to design and release the 1st level of BPM solution without doing any custom coding. The entire deployment is completed in 3 levels.
Level 1- In the first level, the processes are designed as per the Function Specification Diagram (FSD) prepared for the project. Designing process does not include any kind of coding and is built upon the core functionality available within the product. Level -1 includes the following tasks:
First level usually takes 2 weeks time to implement the solution.
Level 2- In the second level, the validation check is provided. Level -2 includes the following tasks:
The 2nd level usually takes 2-4 weeks of time
Level 3- In the last level, all the integrations with external business systems are done. Depending upon the complexity, the last level takes 3-5 weeks of time.
The level-1 implementation is done by using the extensive domain knowledge that Newgen has on different verticals like Banking, Insurances, Financial Institutions, BPOs, SSCs, Telecom, and Government with the wide range of features available in the BPM suite. So, as soon as the level-1 implementation is over, it can be moved to the production site and the client can start using the BPM solution instantly. That happened with the European bank. The users’ feedback on the level-1 system was used to make improvements for the 2nd level. This innovative implementation approach results into the following benefits:
Bio: Sandipan Chakraborty is part of the Marketing Team at Newgen.
In order to capitalize on the growing market opportunities and mitigate potential risks, businesses need to follow the rule of thumb – ‘Sound business processes are the backbone of a business’. This looks like a simple rule, but when brought into practice turns out to be a rather abstruse proposition owing to the fact that the very definition of a ‘sound business process’ keeps changing continuously. Change is the order of the day, and only processes that adapt and respond quickly to changing market requirements, deliver sustainable business advantages. This ability of a business to identify change and to respond quickly to it is termed as business agility.
Now that we understand the basic meaning of business agility, the challenge before us is to understand not only how to achieve the threshold business agility to rise above competition, but also how to maintain that competitive edge. The solution is obvious – incorporate business agility into the very nature of your business processes.
Dynamic processes, capable of reacting and adapting to an ever-changing business environment, can be achieved by underpinning business processes with an efficient Business Process Management (BPM) platform. BPM is essentially a strategic management discipline aimed at continuously improving processes spanning business functions, bringing about the much needed visibility, and agility to facilitate business innovation. Further, the Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) component of BPM enables better control over process output and extensive process performance reporting. To sum up, BPM combines technology with strategic management practices to address changes in real time with minimal IT efforts and thus drives business agility.
Bio: Garima is part of the Marketing team at Newgen Software.
Newgen to sponsor Gartner‘s annual flagship conference under “Emerging Technologies Companies” to be held in Mumbai from 21 to 23 November 2011. Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the industry’s only event to deliver the insights, tools and relationships necessary to create, validate and execute transformative business technology strategies. The advice you hear will help position your business to move forward. Businesses rely on IT leaders — IT leaders rely on Symposium.
More than 500 CIOs, IT leaders, Gartner analysts and technology solution providers will gather at the Renaissance Mumbai Convention Centre Hotel to gain insight on hot topics including social, mobile, cloud, green IT, Pattern-Based Strategy and context-aware computing.
The conference and exhibition features four role-based tracks, plus a special program just for CIOs, focusing on the issues, decisions and actions required for CIOs to be successful. The agenda includes more than 70 sessions, workshops, how-to clinics, roundtables and more. Delegates have the opportunity to book one-on-one meetings with Gartner analysts to discuss their specific challenges.
“When the economy turns south, companies turn inward and focus on operational excellence to prepare for the upturn in economy” – Janelle Hill, Gartner Analyst.
The Value Chain is a concept of business management. The idea of the value chain is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a manufacturing or service organization as a system, made up of subsystems- each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformation processes, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources – money, labour, materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and management. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and affects profits. The main purpose of the theory is a shift in the focus on operational excellence as a source of competitive advantage.
Business process management (BPM) is a holistic management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. BPM attempts to improve processes continuously. It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach. An empirical study by Kohlbacher (2009) indicates that BPM helps organizations to gain higher customer satisfaction, product quality, delivery speed and time-to-market speed. Michael Porter through his book ‘The Competitive Advantage’ introduced the concept of the Value Chain. He suggested that activities that are efficiently managed within an organization will add relative value to the service and products that the organization produces, and all these activities should be run at optimum level if the organization aims to gain any real competitive advantage. If they are run efficiently the value obtained should exceed the costs of running them i.e. customers should return to the organization and transact freely and willingly. By implementing BPM in the activities defined by Porter’s Value Chain Framework, the organization will not only ensure smooth functioning of the activity in isolation but also a seamless integration between all the activities. I believe an organization can achieve Competitive Advantage by studying the fundamentals of Michael Porter’s Value Chain Framework, and implementing the principles of the BPM.
Hence it is important to understand the relationship between the BPM and Value Chain and how BPM can facilitate creation of an environment that will provide the organization with a competitive advantage through Value Chain Analysis.
Name: Swapnil
Bio: Swapnil is part of Newgen's Presales team, working for the company's Regional Office in Mumbai.
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