BPM Helps Financial Technologies Tread Paperless Path

The chaos within an organisation often calls for innovative solutions. In such circumstances, IT generally offers the means to bring order to the chaos. Financial Technologies (India) Limited, the flagship company of Financial Technologies Group, also resorted to a BPM solution to sort out its processes and bring operational efficiencies within a manual and paper-based environment.

Financial Technologies Group has set up several exchanges in India as well as in other places like Dubai, Mauritius and Singapore. MCX (multi-commodity futures exchange), IBS Forex , IEX (power exchange), NSEL (national spot market for agri-commodities) and SNX (safal national exchange for perishable commodities) are some of the popular exchanges set up by the group. The group at large provides technology solutions and domain expertise for financial institutions.

Need to automate myriad manual processes

At Financial Technologies Group, certain functions are group functions, which include administration, HR, infrastructure and IT. The IT requirements of all group companies are considered in unison and accordingly solutions are implemented. The group has seen rapid growth in the last few years with a number of new initiatives. This growth has led to increase in both volume and complexity of business. “We had to take stock of the situation and start looking at automating all kinds of workflows, which have a major impact on the effectiveness of the organisation as a whole,” said Keshav Samant, head-IT, Financial Technologies (India).

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Across the group, there were numerous manual processes, which involved a lot of paper work. In order to automate these processes, the company wanted a solution that would enable it to function as a paperless office, reduce manual tracking of documents (thereby eliminating the risk of document loss) and easily scale with its expansion plans.

Samant says, “It was very important for us to streamline our processes, make sure that we turn around quickly and reduce the lag time involved. This called for a good BPM solution.” The company wanted to deploy a solution, which would allow it to manage as well as monitor processes, to bring much needed efficiency and transparency.

Newgen had the right BPM solution

As the group was experiencing rapid growth, its business processes were bound to change with time. The company was looking for a vendor with a strong presence in India, who could offer the required flexibility and support. Post the evaluation of certain popular and local vendors, Financial Technologies decided to go in for the BPM solution from Newgen. Samant says, “Newgen has a strong installation base in India and also has some reputed companies like ICICI on its client list, which was reason enough to select them”.

The company initially started with a Document Management System (OmniDocs: Enterprise Document Management Engine). However, while implementing this system it realised that DMS alone may not help. From a long-term perspective, the combination of DMS and BPM seemed to fit the bill appropriately.

Thus, the company went on to deploy OmniFlow, an enterprise BPM engine and OmniScan, a production scanning engine from Newgen. Some of the processes that have been automated include loan processing, employee re-imbursement, employee expense management and travel and employee exit and clearance among others.

The DMS enables to effectively create, capture, store, retrieve, distribute, archive and dispose digital content. It supports version-control, review and approval cycles, audit logs, alerts, scanning, access control, automatic indexing, full-text search, document profiles and custom properties.

The OmniFlow engine has helped the company to define, maintain, measure, analyse, and continuously improve its business processes. Various components of the solution like business process modeller, process execution engine and the business activity monitoring module allow effective management as well as monitoring of processes.

For the purpose of process monitoring and improvement, the company is also using some third party reporting tools to generate reports. As the OmniFlow solution is built on open technologies, it allows for integration of third party reporting tools. Together these tools and solutions give the company a clear view of the current state of several business processes.

Samant says that there were some processes, which did not exist earlier and so they had to first develop the workflows. Several processes have already been automated and many others will be automated with time. The first phase of BPM implementation took three months. Those manual processes, which were causing maximum pain and delays were automated first. A spokesperson from Newgen informs that the company is currently implementing solutions related to procurement, performance management and back office work.

Resistance to change – Major issue

The deployments discussed above have bought several changes in the organisation. According to Samant, the major issue, which they faced during this whole process revolved around employee resistance to change.

The Newgen spokesperson said that achieving compatibility of the solutions deployed with employee smartphones (like Blackberry) was a critical issue. The field managers or senior managers at Financial Technologies were required to approve/ reject applications through the Blackberry. “To provide this functionality, integration with e-mail was done and mail utility was customised as per the company’s Internet security policy,” he says.

Transparency brings efficiency

The BPM solution has allowed Financial Technologies to achieve its core objective of functioning as a paperless office and track the entire movement of documents thereby reducing the chances of document loss to nil. “It has brought in a lot of transparency and accountability and we now enjoy tighter control of all processes,” admits Samant.

Earlier, in a manual environment, people used to be clueless if any process got stuck. Now the company has an end-to-end visibility of all automated processes. The solution has helped the company to reduce costs, increase employee productivity, decrease turnaround time and streamline operations, which has proved to be a boon in this period of recession. “As you are able to reduce the amount of paper usage in the organisation also significantly, this can in a way be termed as a green initiative also,” says Samant.

The future

In the future, the company wants to bring more processes across the group under the BPM umbrella. Samant says that due to certain issues of integration, they are already contemplating an SOA-based architecture. The company is also planning to roll out SAP applications in the future and feels that integration of the Newgen solution with such new platforms will be important.