Dewan Housing Finance (DHFL), with a network
of 51 branches and 106 service stations in India, provides housing finance to
the lower and middle income groups in both the semi-urban and the rural belts of
India. DHFL has a comprehensive geographical coverage of more than 930 areas,
comprising of 80 talukas, 282 tehsils and 27 villages with a population size of
less than 20,000.
Housing finance is a secure lending by nature. There are
many big players-both public and private sector banks and lending
institutions, and the competition is also high. “With so much competition, the
biggest challenge facing the company was “differentiation”, says Satish
Kotian, head -IT, Dewan Housing Finance. Aspects like customer service,
relationship, turnaround time and cross-selling have become critical factors
that determine the growth and success in this industry. Consequently,
availability of IT Infrastructure and application software that enable better
performance across all these aspects have become critical. Due to entry of big
national and international players in the housing finance industry, competition
for space and market share is at its highest level, a free and fair access to
the knowledge base and appropriate business information (data) are key to
survive in this industry.
At a Glance Issue: Data Collection and Benefits
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This knowledge base and information is used by various
functional departments at Dewan, and also given to external agencies as per
their requirements and periodicity. The accuracy and ease of availability of
such data are maintained along with the security of the information given.
“Crystal Report from Business Objects gives our users an advantage of
configuring so as to generate business reports suiting the users'
requirement,” claims Kotian.
DHFL is using Crystal Report tool from the Business Objects
stable. The in-house housing finance application has been quite successful in
generating various forms and facets of business data. First a core team was
formulated for gathering the complete set of business and process information in
the various requirements on MIS. The other team was formed to evaluate the
products available in the market on the basis of processing of data, security,
portability, reliability, speed and deployment including scalability and future
usability. Thereafter the two teams sat together and their objective was to come
up with an effective and meaningful business solution that would help the
management to augment and gear up for future business growth.
As a result of this exercise, they could freeze the product specification
that met the immediate business needs of the organization.
With the solution in place, Kotian believes that DHFL as an
organization has understood the success of making it an IT-driven organization.
Implementing this application software has led to transparency in the management
system enabling online availability of information across branches. The whole
environment is becoming more IT friendly. It's the direct success of IT-enablement
that operational people have understood that they have instant access to the
most complex business data almost at their fingertips. The overall business
growth and expanding business has been reflected in the overall RoI. “Had it
been a pure BI Tool, we could have straightaway derived the RoI vis-a-vis cost
of capital and cost of operation,” explains Kotian.