BPM catches on with India Inc.

Indian enterprises are automating processes using business process management, says ABHINAV SINGH

According to Sriman Narayan, by eliminating redundancies in a process, an organisation is able to get a simplified and lean process

NIHAR RAO, chief technology officer, OM Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance, is one happy man. He has transformed the company into a near paperless office, getting rid of many manual processes of documentation. Business Process Management (BPM) has helped reduce the number of steps in different processes, and also helped automate several manual business processes.

There is increasing pressure on enterprises to look at automation to streamline their business processes because of global competition. It has opened a new frontier for Indian software services companies—the profitable business of BPM. These companies are bullish about the global BPM market, and are expecting to secure many projects in the field. Enterprises across the world realise the importance of automating and managing their business processes more effectively and efficiently.

In India, the BPM market is largely driven by the BFSI vertical where lakhs of documents wait to be converted to digital formats for faster processing. The market potential for Indian software services in the BPM sector lies in consulting, auditing, planning and implementing for their customers. As per industry estimates, the global BPM market (including licencing, services and maintenance) was worth $1.2 billion in 2003, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 20-25 percent till 2005.

BPM is no longer restricted to enterprises in the US since there are takers in the domestic market as well. As per vendor estimates, the opportunity in BPM is in the range of Rs 100 crore-Rs 200 crore in the country. OM Kotak Mahindra Life Insurance, HDFC Standard Life Insurance, HDFC and ICICI Bank are already reaping the benefits of BPM. Some vendors like Staffware and Automated Workflow already find the domestic market to be a lucrative one. Staffware works with partners such as Tata Infotech and Siemens Information Systems to target Indian customers in the space. Says Noshin Kagalwalla, country head, Staffware India, “We are optimistic about the Indian market as we have had seven successful BPM deployments here. We are hopeful that the government sector in India will go in for BPM in a big way to realise the objectives of its e-governance programmes.”

Understanding BPM

Noshin Kagalwalla says he hopes that the government sector in India will go in for BPM in a big way to realise the objectives of its e-governance programmes

Enterprises that are setting up new processes want to automate their existing processes with BPM. The dream of a paperless office with minimalmanual intervention and process errors is compelling corporates to go in for this technology. Let’s take a close look at why enterprises have started using it.

• Reduces product cycle time: Enterprises want to bring flexibility in their processes and are moving towards a paperless office. Some of the processes eat away management resources, and managing manual processes is becoming increasingly complex and tedious. Integration and automation also helps organisations to considerably reduce the time to bring their products to market and fine-tune them as per their customer’s requirements. Says N S Nagaraj, associate vice president, SETLabs, Infosys, “We see potential in the BPM space in process re-engineering and re-architecting our customers’ business processes before they are integrated and automated.”
• To remove redundancies: Sriman Narayan, chief technology officer, vMoksha Technologies, says, “By eliminating redundancies in a process, an organisation is able to get a simplified and lean process.” He cites a particular project for a retail customer for whom vMoksha eliminated around 100 processes and streamlined the rest.
• Regulatory compliance: There are organisations which are going in for automation and digitisation of records in order to electronically archive information to meet regulatory norms such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act (which stresses on data archival) and RBI guidelines for Indian banks. In this context it needs to be observed that having a steady archival system is possible only when the processes in an organisation are streamlined—something that BPM facilitates. Efficient processes reduce the turnaround of an enterprise back office, thereby easing the task of archiving information..
• BFSI factor: The BFSI segment is already driving the BPM space, both globally and at the domestic level. Industry pundits observe that BPM projects in BFSI will be big money-spinners. This has been specially observed because organisations such as banks and insurance companies are process centric. For instance, in a bank, the loan processing exercise is streamlined due to minimal manual intervention. Insists Narayan, “There is a quick and immediate return on investment as the process lifecycle gets shortened.”
• Customers need handholding: Says Suresh Raman, the vice president for marketing at Microland, “The challenges in BPM are usually in terms of acceptability, customer organisational alignment, integration (of processes), resistance to change and the perceived value of BPM.” Many feel that streamlining processes involves a lot of cultural change in an organisation; these changes are often met with resistance, and due to the high cost involved in BPM projects, only large organisations are expected to go in for this technology.

Nevertheless, the flexibility which BPM brings to the table is hard to resist. The cost reduction and automation which it brings are the need of the

hour for any organisation. Enterprises abroad have realised this. Although the Indian market for BPM is in a nascent stage, corporates are slowly realising its importance. The market is expected to grow in a big way in the coming years. But for the time being, BPM has arrived—and it promises to stay.

abhinav@expresscomputeronline.com