Our client L&S is a legal advisory and litigation services firm in the domain of Tax and IPR practices. The Tax and International Trade division of L&S consists of more than 120 qualified and experienced professionals from diversified backgrounds such as law, technology, business, science, commerce and accountancy. Their offices are located in 6 cities across India where over 200 professionals and 100 support staff from the field of Law, Technology and Chartered Accountancy are working.
Earlier, cases were allocated based on a manual process and individualistic style, without having a clear picture of work load of each of the professionals within the organization and across the locations. It was difficult to make use of an expert for a particular subject, if he happened to be in a location other than the location of the client. Since the system was based on physical file movement, only one person could work at a time on the case.
Also, the knowledge created over the years, was fragmented and not available centrally for access to the professionals. Coupled with the above there was no visibility to the client about the status of their case unless they knew the specific professional more candidly.
So, the client was looking for an integrated document management and workflow management system capable of dynamic work allocations, knowledge management and assuring clients timely delivery of their cases with excellence. The ultimate objective of the system would be to enable working of legal professionals from anywhere outside the office and at any time of the day. This would provide flexible working and assure clients the delivery of services from any office where the expert would be available. Also, the system would be capable of generating bills and tracking receivables. Last but not the least, it was important to assure the confidentiality and security of client information.
Newgen provided the client the Legal Case Management Solution. Key highlights of the solution are:
The broad functionality, that the case management system provides are- docketing, case allocation, work allocation, task completion by resources, billing and case closure
The solution has empowered professionals across the firm, including Attorneys, Technologists, and Chartered Accountants. It has integrated the work of professionals with accounting. To ease the work of professionals, data capturing activities and other routine works were grouped under a Docketing Cell to perform routine para-legal activities. This has been made possible because of Newgen’s Legal Case Management Solution. This case management solution has the 3 in 1 features of a Business Process Management, Enterprise Content Management and Business Rule Management System, which is an outstanding capability and something unique in itself.
The benefits accrued to the client include:
Bio: Sandipan Chakraborty is part of the Marketing Team at Newgen.
The recently held global award competition for Adaptive Case Management (ACM) implementations, in the USA, was an eye-opener for those who could not envisage Case Management emerging as the next big thing in the IT industry. The prestigious award competition was organized by a veteran award organizer Future Strategies Inc. – most of the times recognized by its director Layna Fischer, and KMWorld- a well recognized magazine for knowledge management. By the way, Layna Fisher is associated with organizing the Global BPM excellence award for almost 2 decades. Unlike any other award competition, the ACM award competition was held globally, which made it more challenging and interesting for all the case management solution providers. Vendors participated and nominated their clients across all the geographies like APAC, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Oceania, North America, South America. The award organizers categorize the nominations into: Customer Facing, Innovation, Legal and Courts, Medical and Healthcare and Public Sector. All the top notch BPM and ECM solution providers across the globe came and showcased their case management solutions implemented by their clients. Some of the vendors even nominated more than one client for this prestigious award.
From Newgen, I was spearheading this project and it was a wonderful experience for me. We nominated one of Newgen’s prestigious clients- Lakshmi Kumaran & Sridharan (L&S) for this award and submitted our nomination under the Legal and Courts category. Finally the comprehensive exercise of case study building, client’s approval, constant follow up, meeting deadlines and co-ordination with the event organizing committee, that lasted three months, did paid off when Newgen’s implementation at L&S emerged as the Gold Award winner.
In my last two blogs, I did talk about the Case Management Solution in generic, but in my upcoming blog I will take the opportunity to showcase Newgen’s Gold Award winning case management solution to you. Broadly I will be covering three aspects: the business challenges faced by the client that led them to look for a case management solution, the solution and its uniqueness, and the business benefits gained by our client.
Keep tuned!
Bio: Sandipan Chakraborty is part of the Marketing Team at Newgen.
A Dynamic Case Management (DCM) solution will be effective if and only if the new business scenarios, situational complexities and exceptions are handled in a timely manner. And to do that, the process workers must be bestowed with power and authorization to take the right decision at the right time. According to the situation, the process workers may select any ad-hoc process route, they can trigger any call for action or they can escalate to higher authority for permission. It’s the individual worker’s decision making ability which will make a DCM solution successful.
A DCM solution can be BPM centric- where the workflow routing becomes dynamic, or ECM centric- where right based content access is provided to the users, or CCM centric- where the right communication channels are chosen for the right customer with right content, or purely Strategic where Business Analytics like Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) tool and Rule Management System are used to monitor the process performance and take the right decisions at right time or change the business rule on the fly.
A DCM solution can be treated as a new layer between traditional BPM, ECM, CCM and Business Analytics tool and core applications. For any given process, various process templates will be available. Process workers will not design any new process templates but they have to select the right template according to the situation. Any new scenario will demand a new process template which will become an integral part of the solution so that it can be referred to in the future, if required. This is the process discovery part which makes the DCM solution more and more effective in time.
Organizations with a strong history of providing complex BPM, ECM and CCM solutions are now focusing on developing DCM solutions. The DCM solution will become a right blend of those individual offerings. To choose a right DCM solution, you must check that:
To use a DCM solution effectively and consistently, the business owners have to be careful about the following things:
The advent of Dynamic Case Management (DCM) in today’s business is not surprising at all. The thing that got us in surprise is the paradigm shift from process to people. In mid 80s, the business world came to a conclusion that they needed a strong robust standardized process framework with minimal people intervention so that the quality of the process outcome did not deviate largely for one from the other.
We all know the stories of Toyota and Motorola and their “Total Quality Management”. The world agreed that – process is the key and defect happens because of process failure and not for the people. This was the ideology that created the platform for workflow management solutions which evolved in time into Business Process Management (BPM) and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. The Business Analytic tools were built along with BPM and ECM tools to monitor the process performance and the quality of process outcomes. During the last 20 years BPM and content management solutions have gone through various changes in pursuit of achieving highest level of performance excellence with consistent quality standards. However, now we have started realizing that skilled workers with excellent decision making ability are required to choose the right process at right time.
The paradigm shift did not happen in one day. BPM and ECM solutions tend to focus on repeatable and structured processes with focused business goals. Single process template is applied for every business scenario. This model worked fine for straight-through processing (STP) workflows with minimal human intervention. However, a single and merely flexible process template could not serve the purpose of driving the customer experiences for service requests, adhering to mandatory compliances and litigant activities. Customer service requests like Loan Processing, Customer On-boarding, Claims Management, Underwriting, Change Requests and adhering to mandatory compliances like IT Governance, right based e-Discovery, fraud handling & auditing are some of the areas where requirement for dynamic case management has become prominent, more than ever. The usual business model did not succeed much in handling uncertain events and incidents associated with any business process. Other than for defined events, the process does not know what to do with the events. Dispute Resolution, Complaint Management, Exception Handling are some of the areas which can be managed my DCM solutions. With a wide variety of customer needs and situational complexities, organizations have started thinking of the automation of dynamic, unstructured and ad-hoc processes.
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