Let BPM Rise

Business processes are the nervous system of an enterprise, and squeezing out inefficiencies from processes and workflows is the way forward. Adopting business process management is one of the easiest ways to accomplish this. BPM automates business processes and provides end-to-end visibility and control over all the contributing parts of any business process, from technology to

people

“The adaptability and agility of IT infrastructure has to match business agility”

Avijit Basu, marketing manager (NSSO), HP India

With Gartner’s prediction that at least 90% of large enterprises will have BPM in their enterprise nervous systems by 2005, many Indian enterprises are also taking the initiative and in turn benefiting from BPM, as was revealed in the ‘Dataquest CIO Meet’, which was held in partnership with Newgen Software Technologies and Hewlett-Packard India in New Delhi recently.

Moderated by Dataquest executive editor Rajeev Narayan, the meet featured a panel of CIOs–Shantanu Mallick from Phillips India, Sunil Gujral from WiproSpectramind, Praveen Upreti from Patni BPO, Upal Chakravorty from Convergys, Jai Menon from Bharti Televentures–and Diwakar Nigam from Newgen and Avijit Basu from Hewlett-Packard India. Presented here are excerpts of the meet:

“We look at BPM as a seamless integration of both automated and manual processes”

Sunil Gujral, Technology V-P, WiproSpectramind

Shantanu Mallick kicked off the proceedings with a presentation on the implications of process automation and management with BPM in the lighting division at Philips India. Speaking of the advantages of implementing BPM, he said: “The number of persons handling payment processes in various units has been cut from 36 to half. Even as we are extending this to other units, we are able to work with half the number of people than earlier.”

But what exactly is BPM? When Rajeev Narayan put the question to the panelists, Sunil Gujral said: “We look at BPM as a seamless integration of both automated and manual processes, while simultaneously embedding business rules into the system so that the processes flow smoothly.”

“It improves quality and has helped us reduce the turnaround time for many of our processes”

Praveen Upreti, Technology Head,  Patni BPO

Commenting on the basic requirements for a BPM solution to succeed, Jai Menon said that the most crucial thing in BPM is “end-to-end integration of different functions in a process”. He gave the example of a number of US companies that were forced to reengineer many of their processes precisely because they did not follow BPM in the first place.

Upal Chakravorty said: “BPM should center around the key processes of an organization.” He quoted the FMCG industry as an example and said that the function of distribution involves some of the most critical processes.

Speaking on importance of BPM in the BPO industry, Praveen Upreti pointed out that BPM has been a part of the core strategy at Patni BPO for processes in finance, HR and other services. “It improves quality, productivity and has helped us reduce turnaround time for many of our processes. And finally, it has saved us a lot of money,” he said.

“Automating processes makes them measurable and reveals bottlenecks in making them more efficient”

Diwakar Nigam, MD,  Newgen Software Technologies

A BPM implementation involves tools like document management and workflow solutions, which in turn need huge amounts of storage for all the digitized information. Commenting on the importance of storage in the success of a BPM implementation, Avijit Basu, marketing manager, NSSO, Hewlett-Packard India said: “The adaptability and agility of IT infrastructure has to match business agility.” He also pointed out the importance of implementing storage that is business process and application aware, “which can then help businesses get maximum RoI out of their investments”.

Speaking on the business need for BPM, Diwakar Nigam said: “Speed is one of the biggest issues in today’s competitive environment and it is the business processes that are key to increasing speed. Automating processes makes them measurable and reveals bottlenecks in making them more efficient.”

“The most crucial thing in BPM is end-to-end integration of different functions in a process”

Jai Menon, IT and Technology director, Bharti Televentures

Menon then introduced the audience to the famed and potent “rule of 6” in managing IT investments, as implemented in

Bharti.

He said: “Any IT project should be owned by business ultimately and IT is just a tool to automate and implement a process.”

Taking the role of people in managing IT further, Chakravorty said that “BPM has to center around customer satisfaction and scalability of business”. Underlining the importance of this statement, particularly with regard to modern services organizations, he said “reengineering of processes has to happen at an early stage, so that processes are optimized before scaling up”.

“BPM should center around the key processes of an organization”

Upal Chakravorty, IT director,  Convergys

Menon also highlighted the importance of SANs in managing the huge explosion of data while keeping costs under control.

Speaking of data storage requirements at Bharti, he said: “To accommodate 5 petabytes data that we are looking at in three to five years, we need to not only have massive storage, but also keep a tight leash on costs–making each single disk work its full capacity. And this is where the advantages of V-SAN (virtual SAN) comes through.”

“The number of persons handling payment processes has been cut from 36 to half”

Shantanu Mallick, Lighting Divisional Controller, Philips India

The discussion also focused on issues of standardization, particularly with respect to the processes and tools to automate them. The panel members allayed audience fears of lack of standardization by introducing them to work being done by industry organizations like Storage Networking Industry Association and Business Process Management Initiative.

Speaking of storage requirements in BPO operations, Gujral said that on account of their nascence as well as type of processes, the amount of data being generated was not so huge as to warrant investments in SANs. “I don’t see any need for SAN right now as the total amount of data in my organization is capped at 400-500 GB,” he said.

Talking about the actual implementation of BPM, Menon also advised people to use BPM tools without much customization. “You may, in fact, reengineer or remodel your processes to suit a package, as the cost of customization can be crippling over and above the cost of the initial package,” he said. Menon further asked the businesses not to harbor any hopes of getting a tool to map to their process cent percent. “Even if a package maps to only 80% to 90% of your actual process, it’s advisable to either ignore the remaining 10% or to remodel that process so that you get the process standardized as per the tool, and not the other way around.”

TEAM DQ