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.
Achieving effective citizen services is the single most important objective of all e-Governance initiatives. Several major initiatives such as online registration, e-filing of returns, building approvals, waste management in municipalities, certificate issuance, etc. have been taken by governments to meet this objective.
These processes need to be monitored and controlled, rolled out quickly and changed for delivering new and better services to citizens. Thus it becomes imperative to implement an effective Business Process Management system for delivering citizen centric services.
BPM addresses the challenges faced in delivering effective citizen services
To provide effective citizen services, it is imperative to ensure that service requests are responded to in the defined timelines. For achieving this, a system should be put in place for monitoring and tracking of requests. Strong exception handling and escalation capability is also required. BPM brings increased visibility through dashboards and monitoring, resulting in faster response times to citizen requests, leading to better adoption of the system and project success.
For e.g. If time frame of 10 days is defined for issuance of Identity Proof then adherence to the time line would require real time tracking & monitoring of requests. If any exception is found such as ‘Date of birth not filled’ or “Photograph not clear”, it can be routed for taking appropriate action. Such exceptions can be isolated and tracked to closure to ensure the services are delivered to citizens.
Delivering Citizen-centric services requires multiple approvals, workflow, processing etc. These workflows involve lots of human decision-making and are document & form-intensive. These workflows require flexibility and cross-department functioning. This requires forms to be made available online for citizens to avail the services. These forms need to have the provision of attaching documents and triggering a route for respective departments to process this request.
Implementation of these processes involves a lot of reengineering. The solution for any large e-governance initiative cannot be rigid and should be built for change. To effectively support reengineering of such government processes there is a strong need for having a business process management framework that gives control to the process owner for quick and effective change management. This also facilitates quick roll out of any new sub-processes.
E-Governance services are accessed by citizens through online portals, kiosks etc. Once these services are available and being used by citizens, the need to add more and more services becomes meaningful. A strong BPM framework used at the back office to deliver these services can facilitate quick deployment and rollout of new services.
Over a period of time, government departments have put-in a lot of time and effort on automation of various individual functions. Many of these applications are fulfilling their objectives but running in silos. One of the critical success factors for the Mission Mode Projects would be the ability for the new solution to co-exist with and leverage the existing IT investments and legacy applications. The BPM platform provides a framework to integrate these services together and deliver the advantage to citizens quickly without the time consuming process of re-building all applications from scratch.
Using Business Process Management as platform for building such services will effectively meet the needs of government process reengineering, human centric workflows, monitoring dashboards, quick building and rollout of new services, change management etc.
“A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed.” – Eric Hoffer
Managing grievances or complaints is one of the top priorities among all private and public sector companies these days; in fact it is the ‘key’ to the growth of any business in today’s fast moving and competitive market.
Today, all major regulatory bodies are concerned about customer rights and fair trade. Almost all major regulators across industries have set up robust grievance management and redressal mechanisms to service and protect interests of end customers.
Seeing exponential growth in the Insurance domain, the IRDA recently developed their Integrated Grievance Management System. The key objective behind this development being to have a single collaborated grievance and complaints redressal system integrated with individual grievance systems of all Insurance companies. This will enable end customer to file the complaints directly on IRDA portal, which in turn will transfer the complaint to respective insurance company’s grievance system and track status updates as per defined turned around time and guidelines. With this IRDA will now be able to track the progress of complaints and overall performance of the Insurance companies.
Customer centric organizations today look for a robust complaints tracking system to ensure superior customer care support and service to their esteemed customers. Inside the organization, internal employee force, complaint redressal process & policies and automation tool together are responsible for successful functioning of the customer care function. The first two of these concerns are overcome with proper training and motivation of employees, buying external expertise or consultancy for best processes and polices, inputs from regulatory compliances etc. But the major that organizations face is in deciding right automation engine, which is robust and flexible enough to adapt to their requirements.
Some companies develop their own custom built systems, which take ages, battalion of resources and months to develop. Some go for readymade CRM tools, but such systems are rigid enough to meet: organizational needs, adherence to compliances, process flow specific requirements and flexibility. Custom changes are again time and resource consuming, and add more rigidity to future change management. Also, overheads and maintenance costs on such systems increases exponentially over a period.
There is another approach to automate these requirements over a BPM (Business Process Management) based platform. An efficient BPM engine enables organizations to automate their business processes within the time frame of readymade tools and with the flexibility of custom built systems. In terms of cost, BPM based automation averages between both and over a period has exponential ROI, when the platform is extended to automation of other processes.
BPM’s graphical process modeler enables process design over clicks as per “your organizational needs”. It enables companies to easily configure their business logics, compliances, escalation matrix, approval flows and reporting metrics as per organizational requirements. Using the graphical process modeler of the BPM engine businesses can design their end to end grievance and customer complaint management process, right from complaint initiation till capturing feedback. Initiation of grievances can be through multiple sources like email, web portal, IRDA’s IGMS system, scanning of physical complaint letters, phone etc., and once initiated all requests can be routed to the central BPM workflow. Thereafter, the requests are routed to the grievance team, internal stake holders and approvers as per the defined flow. BPM’s push based queuing mechanism auto allocates the tasks to respective users. Users will open their respective transactions and initiate the resolution process. System keeps track of the defined TATs (turnaround time). Configurable and advanced TAT management system ensures that the operations meet regulator defined TAT. System sends emails or SMSs in advance to respective users, approvers and stakeholder before crossing the defined deadlines. Based on configured rules, the system can also auto escalate cases to respective users.
“Complaining from dissatisfied consumers is considered as an indispensable tool to learn the Voice of the Customer and becomes increasingly important in many business contexts.” – (Crask et al, 1995)
BPM’s real time reporting engine, configurable report building wizards and management dashboards enable learning the limitations, monitoring the grievances and inputs for further change management of the processes. BPM’s graphical process modeler further enables the organization to adopt inputs from such reports and ensures business advancements.
In a highly cost-conscious business environment, companies have been on the look out for various technological advancements and business models that might help generate a better bottom line. This has resulted in companies across various industries and geographies shifting towards a shared service model.
The basic objective of a Shared Services Center (SSC) is to achieve a higher level of service quality at a lower cost. The centralization of back office tasks including finance, human resources (HR) , and information technology(IT) functions, enables business integration and can lead to significant cost savings. Further, shifting to a SSC allows management to focus on strategic initiatives, freeing time and resources for better decision making. Apart from the major non-core, support functions such as finance, HR, IT, legal, procurement, shared services can also potentially expand into other support functions such as marketing, customer support, distribution and logistics.
However, instituting a SSC is only half the measure towards an improved bottom line. The first and foremost challenge lies in the implementation of new standardized processes (not transfer of existing processes), while making a shift to a SSC. Before migration to a shared services center most processes are performed locally and economies of scale are expected to result from the elimination of redundant business processes. Secondly, SSCs are under constant pressure to reduce costs, while at the same time improve quality through better customer service and a lower defect rate. Finally, as soon as the SSC has been established and is operating steadily the focus changes to continuous improvement of service delivery. In order to ensure sustained value, the SSC needs to proactively anticipate changes in ‘customer’ requirements and respond accordingly.
SSCs need technology that can address these challenges and simplify the consolidation, centralization, standardization and automation of functions and processes. This is where Business Process Management (BPM) can add value. With the market maturing and focus shifting from simple to complex processes, BPM brings about continuous process improvement and enables SSCs to achieve operational process excellence for optimal service, quality and cost.
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