Case Study: HDFC Bank

By automating a process, one can reduce manual interventions and reduce the

discretionary powers vested with people, thus leading to uniformity of service.

At HDFC Bank, this was the prime motivation to go in for a BPM solution.

In the past, the bank had implemented quite a few workflow solutions but

these were largely departmental and not enterprise-wide. The bank observed that

in a typical process like loan approvals that were transactions requiring some

skill-level, there was always a skew in terms of resource utilization in that

these services had to be offered at various locations. If work could be moved

from branches to central locations, the skill levels required at branches would

be low.

An imaging solution partly solved the problem, but if workflow management

were added, the process could get more automated, the management thought.

“We studied a whole lot of solutions for eight months before zeroing in on BPM” Anand Narayan  V-P, IT, HDFC Bank

Says Anand Narayan, V-P, IT, HDFC Bank, "We took about eight months to

study a whole lot of solutions available ranging from document imaging, document

management systems, workflow management, and BPM." Specifically, some of

the products that were evaluated were- MQWorkFlow, Lotus Notes WorkFlow, and

Content Manager Domino-Doc from IBM and Staffware Process Suite v 2 from

Staffware. The choice ultimately fell on Staffware because of its completeness

of approach, right from the stage of defining the business process itself.

The bank started small–with just the trade finance area–and it took about

four months to implement the Staffware Process Suite v2. Reportedly, several new

projects are in the pipeline.

The bank has already seen optimal utilization of resources, better turnaround

time, along with uniformity of service levels and also the ability to provide

differentiated service levels depending on customer profile. The BPM solution

helps the bank to change or amend processes on the fly and also dynamically

reallocate work. Another benefit is a centralized audit trail of each workstep,

leading to better auditing control and process-related MIS.