"MOSS 2007 Should Become A Single Gateway For The End User"

Reliance Group of Companies stepped into the Insurance vertical in 2005 in the form of Reliance General Insurance (RGI). RGI is one of the fastest growing Private Insurance Company in India and has already crossed the 2006-07 sales figures in September. This pace of growth puts extra thrust on IT to keep the momentum going and with that making sure the company is not compromising on data security.

The ADAG formation in 2006 converted the businesses into a retail format rather than a captive unlike before. RGI’s growth does not include the RCOMM customers and there in lies a huge potential.

MOSS 2007 For Collaboration And Service Extension

Keeping this huge business potential in mind and also to sustain the ongoing growth, RGI recently rolled out MOSS 2007. “There are two sides to a business angle, one is the service side and second is sales. We generate a lot of leads from outbound calls, SMSs, RWorld mobile application. The CRM puts them in the form of tasks and then they are converted into business by the sales force to dispose those calls in the lead closure process. Also there is a list of customers in the Do Not Call Registry. MOSS 2007 will empower us to show such filtered information without the need to pull them from multiple systems," says Venkat Krishnan, chief manager - IT, Reliance General Insurance.

“The Business Processes feature offers promising support in what we intend to do in future. For E.g. for a Visiting card procurement process, there is an approval cycle. The card will go to the department head for approval and is passed on to the Administration to get it done. Now we also want to include the people associated with the external entity to become a part of the communication process. So as soon as the Departmental head approves the Card there will be an automatic alert through e-mails and SMS through the portal to the Administration and the external entity, so invoicing just becomes an extension to it. MOSS 2007 will play a considerable in role this”, said Krishnan.

“So we are making it a lot more flexible to integrate the portal with any other ERP that will be deployed. MOSS also has workflow engine which we are trying to use. A marketing content needs to be approved before the team prepares it. Again it has an approval cycle which is being catered to through the portal."

Adopting MOSS 2007

“It is not that MOSS 2007 came as an obvious choice, we also evaluated other options but the reason to go for MOSS 2007 was we have most of our applications built on Microsoft Platform so it becomes that much easy to extend it into the environment. Secondly the investment would be high if we bring in a new portlet from a competing company while in case of MOSS 2007, no extra investment will be needed unless we bring in the next generation of MOSS 2007," states Krishnan.

Giving a view on one of the objectives of MOSS 2007, Krishnan says, “The contact centre employee should use this application as a single gateway on the interface from a system, application and any request point of view.”

Enterprise Search to be adopted in the next phase

“Generally ROI can be calculated for an external agent facing portal or revenue generating portal but applications and softwares which are internal to the organisation are not revenue builders. They are knowledge intensive and domain specific. Under this background, this application is an enabler to show the required analysis about lead generation, employee user friendliness and other data to the management. So, in future the positives of the application will give rise to the demand to include additional features and resultantly prompt the management to buy similar products,” opines Krishnan.

The Enterprise Search feature of the application will be rolled out in the next phase. However, before the implementation, the company needs to decide as to who needs to access and who has got the permission to access what.