CIOIN

Sunil Rawlani

head information systems and technology of HDFC Standard Life Insurance Company

Executive summary

Ask an insurance company, how cumbersome a paper trail can be. But paper, in this industry, is a necessary evil. So many entwined business processes with cascading results, variables and overlapping needs, insurers need to ensure well-defined workflow, which for unprepared companies means an avalanche snowballing of paper. HDFC found a sure way out of this paper jungle.

In 2003, HDFCSL embarked on a mission to cut out the paper chase and embrace Business Process Management (BPM). As one of the first private life insurance companies in India, HDFCSL's operations were characterized by manual processes that were added incrementally to keep up with business requirements. In order to differentiate itself and tap the market more progressively, it adopted the customer-centric approach and offered service as its USP.

The number of Excel worksheets used to track policies were mushrooming. Increased communication for new requirements began to choke the organization. Multiple systems to handle status queries or communicating new management decisions rendered process control inconsistent and inefficient, hitting the organization's ability to measure performance. The inability of business managers to balance workloads coupled with  a lack of insight into productivity created a vicious cycle that sucked business down.

After deliberations, HDFCSL deployed a BPM solution from Staffware (later acquired by Tibco) and an Enterprise Content Management solution from FileNet. But these changes came with a rider: it cost a lot of sweat. The changes required some of the hardest IT activities: designing an accurate business process, mapping process to defined algorithms and incorporating people, management and systems to the change. HDFCSL's IT department had to do a lot of the spade work.

The initial process of identifying key business processes, defining workflow rules and algorithms and weeding out non-critical processes took three months. The process of mapping and designing is an ongoing process although the team of Sunil Rawlani, Head Information Systems and technology of HDFC Standard Life Insurance Company (HDFCSL) tried to do it on the first occasion because un-ironed glitches cold snowball into big trouble.

It began with the creation of a core BPM team, whose job was to identify key drivers and enablers, and design processes accordingly. The core team included people from business, HDFCSL's in-house IT team and the vendor. Top of its list was to automate documents and workflow - Rawlani wanted paper out of the way. Documents were identified, scanned, indexed and committed to an imaging system. The system includes the most sensitive scanners available, since underwriters, who assess the authenticity of documents, need to determine things like whether the same pen was used throughout the form or whether data's been overwritten and manipulated. Only once images are committed and crossed-check by underwriters is a case released into the organization's workflow. His early-mover status didn't leave Rawlani with too many references to draw on. His solution was to take a team of people from operations, the underwriting department and IT on a tour of insurance companies in various South-east Asian countries, who had used similar BPM and digitized workflow technologies.

"This helped a lot, but there was still one major problem that the tour didn't solve," says Rawlani. The roadblock lay with the underwriters. In the manual setup, documents were verified on paper (a portrait view), but scanned images of documents on computer screens were viewed in landscape-mode, making the underwriters' jobs very tedious. With true CIO resourcefulness, Rawlani found a solution that kept everyone happy: he deployed graphics cards that supported multiple monitors. Each underwriter workstation was connected to two 15-inch monitors. One monitor displayed the document up-straight and the other displayed the scanned policy in portrait-mode.

The  benefits, like proper indexing, access control, the ability to include annotations, secure storage, fast retrieval and better disaster recovery are far-reaching. It also ensured better human resources allocation - and that paper is eliminated from the workflow.