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Winner
HTMT: Where employee participation is key
Improvement in the four Ps—people, planning, processes
and products—was exactly what HTMT was looking for. Its businesses were
growing at a fast clip and manual processes were proving to be a bottleneck
 With
increase in business and clients, employees were increasing, following which;
the need to manage data was also growing rapidly. HTMT decided to create a centralised
system to take care of growing intelligence need within organisation and finally
came up with home-grown solution to automate and centralise all processes. In
the entire project employee participation was the prime mover.
Ajay Bakshi, Head, Process Improvement & Automation, Hinduja Technologies
says, “With new businesses coming in from various domains, we found that
employees joined us from various organisations at all levels. Everyone brought
with themselves a unique way of process control, which was good as well as confusing.
A typical characteristic of any BPO organisation is that there are so many team
leads and managers in process and being young, everyone is excited to create
a workflow of their own.”
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Apart from keeping reserves in
terms of time and money, the company also kept a Plan B ready in case
Plan A failed
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As a result, it was taking long time for acclimatisation of every new employee
in the process. Since their internal systems were manual, it would take time
for effective communication and implementation of policies. To address the problem,
HTMT planned to implement the Global Information and Performance Management
System (GIPMS), a home-grown application.
Being in BPO business, HTMT already had adequate infrastructure support in terms
of hardware, so knowledge and options for hardware were not a problem. The need
was to implement such technology, which was robust, expandable and easy to maintain
with no problems in future.
Decision-making process
Decision-making in terms of selection of technologies, automation, cost, employee
participation, etc was the most crucial stage in the whole process of implementation.
“Since there was no past investment in software applications, we had no
worry about any sinking cost. No outside vendor had created any standard solution
to cover centralised and business unit functions of BPO specialty. We knew our
processes well, so we decided ultimately for full fledge in-house development,”
says Bakshi.
“The dates were planned in a step by step manner for centralised functions
and business processes. Apart from keeping reserves in terms of money and time
for having flexibility for unforeseen situation, the company also kept a Plan
B ready in case Plan A failed,” he adds.
Project implementation
One of the biggest objectives was to align and streamline organisational needs
to conduct smooth operations and clarify accountability. The entire conceptualisation,
planning, gap study, development, migration was done by the internal team. The
cost, speed of requirement study, development, testing and implementation were
the key focus areas while deciding about technology.
A huge step was to implement shared services functions and business functions
in a parallel stream. Automation of internal practices at HTMT are being implemented
across its multiple offices in India, and Philippines, Mauritius, Canada and
the US.
Automation of internal practices at HTMT implemented across its multiple offices
in India, and one office each in Philippines, Mauritius, Canada and the US.
It integrated management improvement initiatives into programmatic decision-making
tools.
A centralised solution was envisaged called GIPMS. All locations are connected
to the central system using the Internet. A browser-based user interface in
the form of a global portal is provided to different locations to access the
central system.
It is noteworthy that the company paid high attention on security needs too.
Security was provided at user level and client level. Password management, access
log and audit trial were done to ensure security in terms of system access and
to keep records and logs of all functions accessed to know what data is accessed
at what time, by whom and from where.
- Framework: J2EE
- Client technologies: JavaScript for validation
on client
- Web server is configured with SSL or HTTPS listener
- Server-Side: Struts 1.2.9 framework with
resource bundle used in the presentation tier and for server side validation
- Business EJB Components developed as Session
Façade (stateless and stateful session beans)
- Integration tier separates persistence and data
selection from database
- Persistence layer uses Entity bean (CMP 2.0)
- Data selection uses POJO with DAO which in turn
uses JDBC
- Jasper Reports and Jboss 4.0.3
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- Four new businesses won on the strength of this
tool as the client wanted the tool in its process right after migration.
The annual billing accruing from these four accounts is Rs 4.6 crore
- Quality and SLA management improved productivity,
which added Rs 3.1 crore to HTMT’s kitty
- Attrition has dropped by 8 percent
- Increase in revenue after the implementation
works out to Rs 7.7 crore
- Reduction in expenses after the implementation
is Rs 54 lakh
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Waterfall methodology
Since HTMT was doing development across various business units and automation
was first time within organisation, the company was facing lot of late / divergent
ideas. The company decided to adopt a waterfall methodology in which you can
continuously improve upon the architecture / workflow on a quick basis as and
when divergent ideas get converted to convergent ideas.
According to Bakshi, “Biggest challenges during implementation was frequent
non-availability of business units heads. By the time we started implementation,
they all got very busy with multiple processes within their own units as their
business had expanded. Moreover our business being 24x7 basis, employees were
operating in different time zones. To discuss any one idea in quick time had
hit the time barrier.”
To come out of this issue, the company created sub-teams of each business and
centralised functions and had two to three members from each function. This
eliminated the barrier of time intervals and also created enough manpower in
the implementation team.
| Prior to this implementation, we had challenges
across all facets of operations. We were not meeting the client’s expectations
regarding quality and there was no effective tool to analyse and identify
reasons for the same.
As data collection and the
analysis were not effective, corrective action had to be taken in the
manner that municipal corporations fill in potholes.
The implementation helped
streamline processes, improve monitoring and status reporting and accelerated
process and quality improvement initiatives.
It has eliminated work-load
related to on-time status reporting and has made these reports available
online. Leads and managers had to spend a long time creating reports,
but now they use the time saved by means of the system to analyse reports
and monitor implementation of corrective action.
Knowledge capture and dissemination
was non existent or was limited to classroom sessions. Also in several
processes the information system provided by existing business systems
were not analysis friendly. Some of the processes had lot of non-value
added activities.
Effective tools for root
cause analysis have been created helping create a sharper focus on corrective
action. Leads can now focus on areas that require attention and also on
individuals.
Trends can be monitored
to check the effectiveness of the implementation. Streamlining processes
has helped reduce the workload of agents; consequently work pressure has
reduced.
—Siby
Joy, DGM – Operations, HTMT
Before
Reports for all eight voice
queues were prepared manually for about 480 agents and it used to take
12-14 man-hours to do this. The reports were backed up on Excel sheets.
Managers and leads had to wait till reports were prepared and saved to
a common folder. To compile reports for a period of say a week or a fortnight
was difficult and used to take additional man-hours.
Quality, training, attendance
reports and feedback to agents were done using Excel and this used to
consume lot of time and energy. Computations of performance-based incentives,
process updates et al were difficult to drill down to, and customer appreciation
was difficult to propagate to agents making motivation a difficult task.
Agents couldn’t view their performance statistics.
After
There’s a centralised
database from which reports are generated based upon requirements reducing
man-hours and providing customised intelligence. Statistics are not only
in hh:mm:ss but are also represented graphically for better understanding
across hierarchy levels.
IT has become an integrated
part of various departments reducing data duplication. Agents can view
their performance linked with the Rupee portion of their incentives; agents
can view statistics and figure out what they need to do in order to meet
the benchmarks that have been set down.
It has also become a portal
from which agents can view their transport arrangements, birthdays of
fellow employees, customer appreciation and any official announcements.
—Hiro
Soneji, AGM – Operations, HTMT
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Key to success
Coming to Client’s deliverables, HTMT achieved superior quality levels
through just-in-time online feedback, hypothesis testing and statistical inference.
The automated data routing and monitoring system enabled team leads and supervisors
to put in an average of 10 percent to 20 percent more time on the floor.
The company feels that a tight monitoring of tasks on daily basis, frequent
and immediate interactions with user groups, parallel testing of workflow and
validation of rules built in saved lot of time and unnecessary coding.
All this was possible because the end user group was continuously kept in loop
and repeated discussions with them brought the clarity to everyone involved
in terms of their roles, responsibility and timelines.
The company plans to expand the reach of this application to all existing internal
and external clients—as well as acquire four new external clients on the
strength of this tool as a differentiator.
| For this particular category, there were not many
nominations and hence the competition was not very tough. The implementation
has resulted into great efficiency building internally but has not benefited
the customers much.
Internally they have done an excellent job. Now, the
company should focus on its customers. Also, I think the initiative that
they took has been done earlier in the industry, but the reason why HTMT
stands apart from others is that it did this for a lower cost. Personally
I feel the implementation was late, but it’s better to be late than
never.
— Jury Member, Sunil Mehta,
Senior VP and Area Systems Director,
Central Asia, JWT
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| Hinduja TMT (HTMT) is the Hinduja Group’s endeavor
to provide a ‘one stop shop’ when it comes to information technology
services—be it contact centre services, back office processing or customised
IT solutions. HTMT is a publicly listed company on both the National Stock
Exchange and Bombay Stock Exchange.
HTMT’s IT and BPO domain expertise lies in the areas
of insurance, financial services, manufacturing, telecom, pharmaceutical
products, consumer electronics, household products, energy and utilities.
Within India, the company has delivery centres in Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad
and Chennai.
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