‘Monitoring of processes made easy’

Business process management (BPM) coupled with document management (DM) is gaining momentum in the banking and BPO sectors. Diwakar Nigam, managing director, Newgen Software Technologies, spoke to Dataquest about the BPM and DM market in India, its future, and his plans to address this market. Excerpts…

Are you targeting the BPM segment exclusively for the BPO market?

Business process management starts from process automation and is applicable to any kind of process. It could be used in banking, which essentially involves multiple transactions or even in offshore facilities that require constant monitoring of processes. The government is also open to the idea of BPM, and we are going to cash on this opportunity.

What is the worth of the BPM market at present?

Worldwide, the market for DM is $12 billion to $15 billion and that for BPM should be about $5 billion to $6 billion. Talking of India, we estimate that last year the market stood at Rs 50 crore for DM and BPM. This year it should double to Rs 100
crore.

How do you see the market growing in the near future?

The market in India is presently growing at 100%. According to Gartner, by 2005, at least 90% of the large enterprises will have BPM. Right now, the BPM market is small but growing very fast. It is an emerging technology. Worlwide, BPM is growing by 25% and DM by 10%. DM has been established over eight to nine years so that market is worth about Rs 12 crore to Rs 15
crore.

What is the typical investment in a DM deployment? And what’s the RoI?

Typically, it would be between Rs 25 lakh and Rs 30 lakh depending on how many seats they go for to begin with. The costs go up as the seats keep increasing. The main benefit of these solutions is a reduction in the cycle time of moving a transaction and also ensuring the quality of transactions.

Who are your corporate clients?

We have customers like Philips and Asian Paints, who are using these solutions in an interesting way. Then we have orders from Wipro Spectramind, EXL, Nipuna, Patni, Max NewYork Life and Bajaj Alliance. In government, we have got some very good orders recently.

How adaptive are people to the idea of automating their processes?

Customers are slowly getting comfortable with the concept of automation. The projections are that in the next two years, 75% of corporates will go for it. The business process outsourcing sector is also driving business from another end because they can monitor their success by double data entry and catching the error rate.

What’s being done at your R&D labs?

We have a product development team both for document management line products and process automation. We have a 250-strong team in Delhi for product development for both lines–process automation as well as document management. We are bringing in new products, looking at new upcoming standards and incorporating new features in our products. More that Rs 70 crore of R&D investment has gone into it over the last 10 years and we have developed products that are in the same league as those by SAP.

NEETU KATYAL in New Delhi