Project log

Workflow transformation at Wividus

N L Balasubramanya, head of Wividus, tells Vinutha V how Newgen's workflow solution has helped the company speed up its employee and vendor claims processing

Wividus, Wipro’s Shared Services Centre, a captive BPO operation, handles back office operations including employee claims, loan processing, accounts payables and HR-related activities of Wipro Technologies, Wipro Spectramind and Biomed. The organisation handles the entire transaction processing load of claims, reimbursement and provident fund for 30,000 employees across Wipro’s various units.

Chasing paper

The entire business, management and enterprise planning is taken care of by SAP R/3. We decided to implement Newgen’s Workflow Solution in August 2004 to tackle the challenge of transaction processing. Over 1,300 transactions were processed in a day at that time. These comprised various claims including employee benefit plans, reimbursements, loans and provident fund; earlier, all these processes were manual and paper-based, and added to our work. Every day there would be an accumulation of paper invoices and receipts. We needed a solution that would take of care of imaging or scanning these papers, managing workflow, and saving the documents, thus automating the entire employee and vendor settlement claims. Retrieval of required information in real-time was a major need as there would be repeated enquiries from both employees and vendors.

Although SAP R/3 was the backbone of the entire business management taking care of financial, order, billing, HR and employee data, it was not able to handle a few aspects of the transactions such as imaging and workflow. We were looking for a locally-available solution so that implementation would be easier. Since the BPO unit of Wipro Spectramind was using Newgen’s OmniFlow for one of its clients to carry out transaction processes, we were referred to use this solution for our business as well.

Employee payments simplified

Employees from 70 locations across India, Europe and the US claim their reimbursements through the intranet system. Different product suites—Newgen’s OmniFlow, OmniDocs and OmniCapture—are used for capturing, archiving, scanning, indexing and retrieving large volumes of documents and content. Employees raise their claims in SAP and send the supporting bills along with the claim sheet to us for processing. The claim sheets and bills are scanned using OmniCapture and exported to OmniFlow, which is a work-flow system. We check each claim to see if it is in accordance with the company’s policies, then it gets routed to the appropriate person based on the type of claim. The claims approved for payment are updated with the payment details, and are moved to archival after intimating the employee through e-mail about the claim having been processed. Once claims are approved for payment, OmniFlow transfers the payment details to the respective banks of the employees. The documents of the entire process are archived using OmniDocs for retrieval down the line.

The vendor side

We manage payables of about 3,000 vendors including service, material, civil and foreign vendors. Their bills, along with the invoices, are scanned using OmniCapture and are exported to OmniFlow to the processing agent queues. The agents process transactions and either approve a document or hold it to be clarified with the vendor. The transactions for which there is no Tax Deduction Statement (TDS) are moved to the manager’s queue for approval, and the rest are sent for TDS and then sent for approval. The manager gives the final approval for the payment of the transactions, and will revert to the processing agents for any clarification. Using OmniFlow, we send the payment details to the respective banks of the vendors. The audit carried out for this process is also based on the same criteria, on the completion of which documents are archived in OmniDocs.

Productivity increased

We centralised the transaction-related work of all the business units of Wipro at Wividus, which was established in April 2003. In July 2004 we felt the need for a new workflow solution which could complement R/3. Post-August 2004 we have been working through the different product suites of Newgen. Initially we faced the challenge of change management when the entire paperwork shifted online. However, we have seen productivity increase by up to 15 percent.

The capabilities of handling data capture are well addressed in OmniFlow; it initiates immediate remedies to exceptions and resolves them. OmniFlow provides managers and team leaders with varied statistical information such as the number of transactions processed by each agent at any given time; this helps them analyse the performance level of each agent. The simple way of saving huge amounts of data is achieved through OmniDocs.

Meeting Service Level Agreements is much easier. Earlier, employees in various parts of the globe used to get their claims cleared within 15-21 days. After deploying OmniFlow, we have reduced the clearance period to just five days. We are able to track the number of receipts and payments that are pending. Online retrieval of status information is a major advantage. We are thus able to meet our business requirements, and keep employee and vendor satisfaction high. At present we are using 50 user licences of Newgen’s product suite, a figure which might go up depending on our requirements in future.