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L.N. Revathy

Bringing method to the flow of data in a company can change its life and its customer's.

IMAGINE this — You rush to the nearest medical store with the prescription. The pharmacist looks at the list and starts rummaging in the rack. He spots two of the six medicines in the list. You now have to decide — either visit the store again to collect the remaining medicines, or go to the next store with the prescription.

If the pharmacist had had absolute control over inventory, he wouldn't have made you wait. Such delays can prove costly, both for the buyer and the seller.

If organisations (big or small) can automate business processes, such problems can be ironed out.

Take an insurance company or a bank, for instance. Servicing and retaining customers can pose a big challenge for both. To retain the customer base and grow in a highly competitive environment, such organisations must offer the best products and services.

Diwakar Nigam, Managing Director of Newgen Software Technologies, concedes that processes are more complex at present than ever before. "Manual processes represent one of the biggest challenges for enterprises. When BPM (business process management) solutions are deployed, it facilitates modification of process rules and workflow without affecting the underlying applications, systems or people involved. Instead of manually mapping out the entire workflow, BPM aids in blending both automated and manual processes. It helps weed out inefficiencies and smoothens workflow. A `perfect fit' BPM solution is what organisations look for, particularly because these processes tend to evolve over time in response to market conditions.' The workflow is `smoothened' through ensuring that data passes through processes with several steps, one after the other in an order defined by the user.

Max New York Life (MNYL), a private player in the life insurance sector, has implemented NewGen's BPM solution. The workflow system — `MyFlow' — covers policy owner servicing (POS), new businesses and claims.

The POS department services enquiries from policy owners. When business started growing, the department struggled to meet customer demands. That was not all. The company had to handle various combinations of enquiries. Some were common across policies, but others were specific to individual policies (a single customer could have multiple policies). Services included change of address, purchase of paid-up additional coverage, nominee change, and addition of new policy riders.

The POS department faced the following issues:

Increased effort to service each customer as it was dependent on multiple disparate IT systems;

tracking of work, especially for multiple requests, became unmanageable;

system complexity arising from handling 29 different work types;

signature verification critical for servicing requests;

activities like generation of letters, and file and folder requests resulted in time lag as they were done manually;

frequent movement of files across departments increased the risk of misplacement and wear-and-tear;

and, above all, productivity could not be assessed accurately.

MYNL automated the workflow and business processes to maintain aggressive turnaround timeframes to service all types of customer requests. With approximately 70 work steps and several hundred rules, the BPM solution was designed to handle the complexities of multiple requests.

But to use BPM effectively, organisations would have to stop focusing exclusively on data and data management. They will have to adopt a process-oriented approach, eliminating the distinction between work done by a human and a computer, says Punit Jain, Vice-President, Newgen Software Technologies.

Gartner has predicted that at least 90 per cent of large enterprises will have BPM in their enterprise nervous systems by 2005. High volume transactions such as claims processing in insurance, accounts receivables processing in manufacturing and loan processing in banking are being automated.

The BPM market in India is largely driven by the insurance and banking verticals. Almost all private insurance players, as also BPOs, use BPM technologies, says Diwakar.

According to Jain, the costs varied dramatically and could be determined only on a case-by-case basis. "On a cost-benefit scale, the cost is definitely not substantial as BPM is one of the few technologies that has a quick return on investment. Additionally, BPM implementation does not follow a Big Bang approach. Rather, it proceeds process by process. Hence a company can spread its investments over time and automate the critical processes first."

A single process can take 4-12 man-months for automation, depending on the complexity. Reports predict a substantial BPM spend till 2005. Though manufacturing, financial services, retail and distribution are expected to be the leading verticals, BPM is gaining momentum across small and large enterprises, especially in the services sector.

But some organisations, like your neighbourhood drug store, may take longer to clue in.

lnr@thehindu.co.in

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