Process perfect at Newgen

What do banks and BPO companies have in common? Both use document management and workflow solutions. That’s where Newgen’s focus on BPM and document management is paying off, says Prashant L Rao

At Rs 50 crore, the Indian market for document management solutions is minuscule when compared to its global counterpart, a $14 billion (Rs 70,000 crore) behemoth. Still, it is projected to double this fiscal to

Rs 100 crore. Banks, telcos and BPO outfits are driving the market in India. Banks and insurance companies are centralising their back-office work and document imaging and workflow solutions have an important role to play here. There’s also a lot of digitisation going on in government. “Most companies are done with ERP and core banking. The next step is document and process streamlining,” says Punit Jain, vice president—Sales & Marketing, Newgen Software Technologies.

100 percent product company

According to Punit jain, most companies are done with ERP and core banking. The next step is document and process streamlining

Newgen is a pure product company focused entirely on business process management, document management and workflow solutions. Its J2EE-based OmniDocs and OmniFlow applications hook up with core banking, sales force automation (SFA) or ERP systems and can scale up to thousands of users. The company spends Rs 10-11 crore per year on new product development. It also mploys 250 developers, of whom 120 are totally focused on product development and R&D.

Workflow solutions for BPO

OmniFlow has been a hit with the BPO crowd and is being used by Patni, EXL, Spectramind, Transworks and Nipuna to automate customer processes such as credit card applications, consumer loans and account opening. BPO companies use OmniFlow for processing transactions of their financial services customers—insurance claims, credit card applications and home loan applications. Transaction processing is faster and higher volumes are possible with this solution.

Newgen’s solutions are industrial-strength ones. While other companies offer document management solutions that let you scan and index scanned documents, few offer comprehensive workflow and business process management. The company’s strong focus on R&D and product development is paying off and as the document management market grows, Newgen should benefit in equal measure.

Citibank Web-enables account statements

The Chennai-based credit card division of Citibank caters to more than a million cardholders in India. The division generates statements of accounts for MasterCard, Visa and Diners Club cardholders. These statements of accounts for all cardholders are generated every month at the respective branches and sent to Chennai, where they are printed on a special printer and despatched via courier to the respective branches from where they are again despatched to customers via courier.

The problem

The cycle from the time the reports were generated from the branches till the time they were despatched to the customers took around eight to 10 days. The expense involved in printing and dispatching the monthly statements to cardholders was considerable. If a customer asked for a copy of a three-month-old statement, the system had to be taken offline, the backup restored and the statement generated. The customer had to wait for a couple of days. As per RBI regulations records needed to be maintained for a couple of years

The solution

Newgen’s Gold Reports (NGR) product was used to maintain Citibank’s computer-generated reports. Statements of accounts from different branches across the country were collected centrally at Chennai. The reports were defined and indexed on fields like customer ID, customer name, etc. The indexed reports were compressed and stored in predefined report groups in a chronological order on the Web server.

Authorised customers can now log-in to the website and view their statement of accounts, doing away with the delay in printing and dispatching statements. Account receivables was improved. Users in the credit cards division can now make queries on reports from their desktops and access specific transactions in reports in a matter of seconds. Users can annotate remarks on reports for reference or to initiate action. They can extract matching transactions in reports and print them. Reports can also be analysed by exporting them to tools such as Excel or Access for trends, credit information and forecasts.

Reports can be exported to other users, avoiding photocopying and printing. Newgen also put in a security architecture comprising firewalls, filtering routers and encryption to secure account information.

Benefits

The time taken for the printing and despatching of statements has been reduced to a couple of hours from eight to 10 days. Printing and courier charges have been eliminated. Duplicate copies of historical statements can be printed in a couple of minutes without taking the system offline.

Press Trust of India manages clippings electronically Press Trust of India (PTI) has over 100 news offices in India, including automated offices in the four metros. PTI maintains an elaborate filing system constituting newspaper clippings that are used on a regular basis. The process of filing these clippings was manual—each newspaper was searched for relevant clips and filed. The clippings were indexed by source, client, nature and date. The files were divided into three sections relating to clients, the client’s competitors and the industry. Each associate consultant responsible for a client had to track the news and articles concerning his or her client. Clippings related to branch office clients were faxed or sent by courier from the head office to respective branches on a weekly basis.

The problem

As PTI’s client roster grew so did the media, making its job that much tougher. All the branch offices were tracking clippings of clients in regional editions of newspapers. These were faxed or sent by courier to respective branches increasing duplication of work, adding to the photocopying, fax and courier cost. Filing and retrieval was taking an increasing amount of time. A centralised clipping management system was required so that the clippings could be scanned at the branch office and directly archived on the central server. Once this was done, anybody could search from any branch and fetch the image of a required clipping from the centralised system.

The solution

Newgen’s OmniDocs was used to set up a centralised clipping management system. The entire load of clippings was converted to digital images. Digital images of clippings scanned at the branch offices were centrally archived on 4.6 GB optical media. A single optical disk of 4.6 GB can store 65,000 clippings.

Benefits

Compressing the images saved a lot of space used by stack-halls. A single clipping can be filed in multiple folders and accessed in multiple ways. The workflow feature of OmniDocs let executives fetch the required clippings within 20 seconds today.

prashant@expresscomputeronline.com