DLF Enhances 'Service Billing' With FileNet P8

As enterprises expand presence across verticals and locations, the significance of DMS and ECM in the functioning of the organisation is only increasing by the day. Recently, India’s premier real estate company DLF adopted FileNet P8, a Document Management solution.

This is the first time that the company has experimented with such a solution and is one of their maiden deployments. One of the primary reasons why they toyed with it was to overcome the issue of prolonged downtime. “Service billing was an area where there were enormous delays. Additionally, nobody knew what’s going in or coming out – there was a total lack of transparency,” says DLF CIO Upal Chakraborty.

Improving traceability of transaction billing and reducing the huge turnaround time were some of the other objectives that were to be met, if the business had to function smoothly.

Chakraborty considered another product called the EMC Documentum, however, finally decided upon FileNet P8. One of the main reasons for this was that FileNet was an IBM product and the latter already had a long-standing relationship with DLF.

An overview of FileNet P8

Broadly, the solution consists of three core components. ‘Application Engine’ as the name suggests hosts the critical applications, development tools and Java applets. It also helps in logging in user credentials.

The second component, ‘Content Engine’, contains lots of tools using which the administrator can manage enterprise-wide workflow objects, storage and metadata.

Finally, the ‘Process Engine’ provides services for managing all aspects of business processes, such as Execution, Routing, Rules Management, Simulation and Modeling, and Workflow analysis.

Implementation Process & Benefits

The solution is being adopted in a phased manner with the ‘Service Billing’ module going live first. There were several rounds of system designing, testing and pilot projects (user testing) before it got the final go-ahead.

In the beginning, we mentioned that improving traceability of billing information was one of the primary objectives of this exercise. Now, all of it is accurately tracked and stored in a repository system, which also eliminates duplicate billing. And as the solution is integrated with the ERP system, the information is all the more accurate and available easily. This also leads to savings in manpower costs. “We have noticed a significant shift in customer satisfaction after using this solution. We are able to process payments faster and have reduced the turnaround time involved,” says Chakraborty.

In the future, the system would also be extended to other billing systems present in the organisation. On the compliance front, the system would help them keep track of the latest compliance policies and government approvals needed. In the long term, there are also plans to review the security infrastructure at DLF as a part of its IT initiatives.