Kuoni Achieves Paperless Processes Through OmniDocs

Steve Morris in his book, The Handbook of Management Fads discusses the ‘paperless office’ as a ‘squib’ born out of computerisation. According to the book, computers haven’t reduced the use of paper; rather, its usage has grown. Yet, companies find it worth investing in Document Management Systems (DMS) in order to attempt creating a paperless office. Their quest to achieve better control and risk management could be the reasons behind this.

Kuoni Travel Group is one such company, which recently implemented Newgen software’s OmniDocs and OmniFlow DMS. Kuoni, spread across four continents runs four different but self sufficient and independent businesses in India including Outbound Travel (SOTC, Kuoni Holidays etc), Destination Management (SITA, Tourclub, Distance Frontier, E-holidays), Business Travel (BTI or HRG) and VFS (a BPO operation having presence across 41 countries worldwide).

The need for freedom

The main objective of the project was to centralise and detach the finance function from the businesses. These included payables and receivables for clients and suppliers which are very large in numbers such as airlines, hotels and other services. According to Dhiren Savla, CIO, Kuoni, “Any attempt to send papers to shared service would have killed the project. It was extremely important to automate the work flow processes.”

Earlier, the various offices would send paper documents for processing to their respective divisional finance teams. This was supported by integrated LOB applications but the need for document movement remained. Savla mentions, “In the new set-up, documents for payments and receipts received by various locations get scanned by third-party vendor and tagged on our DMS system. These documents go to the warehouse for physical storage to comply with regulatory/ IT needs.”

Migration to process automation

A lot of products, both local and international were considered. As the group was in the process of a SAP shared service mode implementation as well, SAP’s DMS was a potential solution. Newgen’s OmniFlow (Business Process Management tool) and OmniDocs (Document Management System) emerged as winners based on the criteria of fulfilling their specific need, local support, total cost of ownership, current deployments with Indian corporates, technology fabric and vendor feasibility.

Initially, they wanted to implement the product and scan/tag it themselves. But Savla discovered, “While planning for infrastructure, people, and space it was clearly evident that it’s best given to experts. We chose a partner called NAX, which also does our physical document storage.”

The Newgen team closely co-ordinated with the PriceWaterhouseCoopers team and implemented the DMS across all 4 businesses. This implementation took three months time and went live in November 2006.

With about 150 users currently, the deployment runs on HP blade servers with MS- SQL as the backend. The 70 offices in India are connected over Sify MPLS network and over 50 international locations are running on MPLS network of BT; or IPSEC VPN where MPLS is not feasible.

Processes like accounts payable, accounts receivable and the internal approval processes were successfully automated. They were also able to achieve task allocation and TAT measurements with SSC, which is a BPO set-up.

Achieving process transparency

The implementation cost about 30 million rupees. They achieved non-tangible benefits like process transparency and efficiency due to automated task assignment, monitoring and control. But the major physical change was the conversion of the large storage space in the Shared Service Centre offices into a recreational area including gymnasiums and TV rooms. This gives the employees an advantage too. Savla confirms that reduced manpower, freeing up expensive office space, and the ability to take larger volumes at the same costs justified the investment completely.

While trying to achieve a paperless office may be a management fad, effective utilisation of DMS can definitely make the office use less paper. Steve Morris may not be wrong, but Indian corporate groups would like to prove that that the DMS decision is right.