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.
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.
In this fast changing business landscape, the only thing that has managed to keep pace with the evolution of technology is the evolution of customers’ expectations. Customers today demand more of everything; more value for money, more features, more comfort, more customization and more positive experiences. Apparently, this poses a challenge for businesses to meet and exceed customer expectations, in order to remain competitive. However, this challenge comes with a surprise package – the opportunity to build customer trust and loyalty by surpassing customers’ expectations and gaining a competitive edge over other players in the market. To leverage this opportunity to its fullest, a business needs to focus on achieving process agility or the ability to align processes with dynamically changing market requirements.
Access to the right information, at the right time, by the right people is the key to profitably meeting the ever-increasing customer expectations, in a volatile and globally competitive business landscape. To achieve true agility across the breadth and scope of all operations, an organization needs to practice continual process improvement by implementing more flexible and transparent processes and systems that are capable of accommodating changes seamlessly and quickly.
Automation of business processes has become the order of the day, but to differentiate themselves from competition, business organizations are increasingly turning to Business Process Management (BPM). At its outset, BPM primarily focused on automating workflows and moving documents from “system to system”, but today it has evolved to incorporate more “human-centric” and role-based capabilities across the process lifecycle. This enables stakeholders at different levels of the organizational structure to take the appropriate action at the right time and to more directly drive the creation and management of business processes with minimal dependence on IT. An efficient BPM platform underpins the IT infrastructure and enables an organization to lower operational costs, increase productivity and enhance customer experience.
Bio: Garima is part of the Marketing team at Newgen Software.
Human Resources have always been an integral part of any organization and the success of an organization is largely dependent on the quality of its resources. To achieve optimum utilization and efficiency of human resources, various strategies are introduced by different organizations, such as training and development, reforms in policies for recruitment, selection or retention, change management, better compensation, programs to enhance employee motivation, recreation, employee benefits, facilities and so on, the list is never ending.
Many organizations feel that productivity can be increased by motivating employees or providing training; many feel that change in management structure is required, recruitment should be proper, working environment should be improved or policies should be changed while some others feel that incentive or payment structure should be improved. Similarly many more thoughts are there to debate, but in this post I would not discuss the improvement in employee productivity through these means, but explain how supporting employees by providing tools which can help them to gain edge faster, as compared to traditional means of improvement, which can at times prove to be sheer wastage of time and resources. In simple terms if you are weak in calculations then instead of learning mathematics and going through the learning classes, just use calculator and move forward. So in my opinion, we should improve our abilities instead of improving our inabilities. I don’t know how many agree with me but this my perspective.
Please do not misunderstand me, as I am not at all against any of the traditional means to increase employee productivity, but I am attempting to suggest methods to synergize the ability of employees. Based on the above argument, IO believe that every organization must have automated business process for the tasks which are repetitive in nature or require fixed or closed ended operations, such as approval of a loan for a certain value on fixed parameter, or classification of customers for insurance approval, or calculation of perks, incentive, targets etc based on fixed calculations, or taking any kind of business decision based on business rules, or physical activity like retrieving a physical document from the record room etc.
These repeated activities generally do not involve creativity and decision making, but can result in employee dissatisfaction or monotony in job or wastage of human intelligence for the jobs which can be performed through automation. Automation will help employees in performing their jobs with accuracy (through automated tools) and allow them to devote more time in improving processes to increase operational efficiency and reduce turn around time.
Identifying this need of business organizations across industry verticals, Newgen has developed software products like Document Management System and Business Process Management System to take care of all possible process automation needs of organizations and help these organizations in synergizing employee productivity; just like what calculators did to enhance the productivity of individuals with weak calculation skills.
Name: Hemant
Web Site: http://www.newgensoft.com
Bio: Hemant is Senior Manager - Processing Services with Newgen Software Technologies Limited
Organizations are now more concerned about greater efficiency with low cost of operations, a great composition for win-win scenario. Every organization uses paper documents in some way to run their day to day business and is also putting its best efforts to reduce paper usage without affecting its business while trying to improve the efficiency at same time. The best method to achieve the said goal is digitization and automation of the complete business process. Automation through BPM (Business Process Management) solution and digitization through DMS (Document Management System) solutions will improve the process time drastically and eliminate the use of paper documents respectively, a win-win situation.
Basic input for any automation or digitization process is to scan the documents (to eliminate the dependency on paper documents) and capturing of contents on paper documents (to run the process based on the contents mentioned on the paper documents), but the cost of operations and wrong selection of software/ hardware results in dropping the great idea of progress through automation in about 60%-70% of the cases.
In my earlier articles like “Document Quality Analyzer: Automated Quality Checking without Operators “, “DIGITIZATION OUTPUT: Operator, Not Scanner, Defines Production”, “SaaS (Software as a Service) – Software on Subscription Based Model”, “DIGITIZATION – King Without Crown of Business Universe”, “DIGITIZATION REDEFINED – Digital Camera as Book Scanner”, “Data Capture/Entry without Operators (ICR Technology)”, we have shown the methods to bring down digitization cost, but the cost of content capture is still a cause of concern. The simple reason for this is the lack of awareness about great technologies such as ICR (for automated capturing of hand written contents), OMR (automated capturing of bubbles, check marks etc) and OCR (automated capturing of machine printed contents).
Availability of ICR technology has helped to capture content from documents for many years, but the basic requirement of this technology is, documents in structured format (fixed position of text on the documents), whereas about 90% of the documents are semi structured or unstructured, but the advancement in ICR technology has now shown the way to cater even semi/unstructured documents, now even running handwriting can also to captured by the software and saved as digital content. ICR technology is now so flexible that even floating text (if the position of text varies in every document) can also be captured and saved as structured digital content.
Now the full cycle of digitization i.e. “Scanning” and “Content Capture” is completely automated and completed with minimal expenditure, while resulting in huge improvements in efficiency of business processes. A true example of the “KAIZEN” method.
Name: Hemant
Web Site: http://www.newgensoft.com
Bio: Hemant is Senior Manager - Processing Services with Newgen Software Technologies Limited
Masaaki Imai introduced the Kaizen method for continuous incremental improvements to the corporate world, through his book, ‘Kaizen: The key to Japan’s success’, in 1986. The concept spread across industries like fire and became a fad the world over. The Japanese philosophy of Kaizen is about constant continual improvement at low cost, involving everyone at all levels in the organizational structure, and applying much common sense.
Assuming that every aspect of our life should be driven by constant improvement, Kaizen aims at elimination of waste (activities for which the input – output ratio is extremely low). It often refers to rearranging processes in a better and less complex workflow. The next step is standardization of this better process. The cycle of Kaizen activity also known as Shewhart cycle or Deming cycle has the following four steps that are repeated ad infinitum:
Manual coordination of activities in organizations leads to inefficiency and errors in the operational process and often obstructs process improvement itself. Business Process Management (BPM) was recognized by the academic world in the fifties and sixties as an effective tool for managing quality. Later, Hammer & Champy (1993) defined a process (business process) as “a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer.” With their definition they highlighed the benefits of process management, process (re-) engineering, and workflow management to business managers. They established the importance of BPM to the success of modern enterprises. BPM leads to a continuous cycle of process improvement. Ideally it aims at saving money, saving time, improving compliance and adding value to an organizations workflow. The BPM lifecycle involves the following major steps:
Today, BPM in its capacity as a continually evolving set of technologies, to establish goals and strategies for the improvement of operational processes that affect an organization’s performance, to some extent is Kaizen.
In an era in which businesses are competing globally, government organizations seek more agility and efficiency, while being able to drive down costs and strictly follow the established Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). In addition, the omnipresent requirement of better responsiveness to citizens’ needs is spurring governments all over the world to seek IT-based solutions to effectively address such myriad issues. As a consequence there has been observed a growing trend among Government departments at all levels to go for automation of paper based processes for faster decision making and improved efficiency.
The Indian government’s National e-Governance plan comprising of 27 mission mode projects aims at creating a framework for, and promoting long-term growth of, e-Governance within the country. The plan seeks to create a citizen-centric and business-centric environment for governance. The objective of this plan is to use the latest technologies and tools to enhance internal efficiency in the administration and provide better services for citizens, specifically in the areas of eServices, e-Courts, e-District, Land records, e-Office, e-Municipalities, Police, Transport etc.
Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management are key technologies which provide immense value to the e-governance projects. Office automation solutions like File Movement and Tracking, Correspondence Management, Grievance Management etc allow Governments to enhance citizen services by reducing cycle time of query handling, increase coordination with various departments, reduce errors and improve responsiveness to citizens.
Key benefits of using ECM and BPM based solution for Office Automation are:
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