Viewpoints: Business Process Efficiency

In today’s competitive environment, financial institutions are challenged to meet customers’ expectations, accelerate the time-to-market, optimize constrained resources, improve productivity, leverage IT investments and make better decisions based on current data. But considering the number of mergers over the last decade, that’s a tall order to fill. It’s not unusual for organizations to be made up of multiple business units with separate IT departments, user directories and applications. Many are struggling to assess how much information exists in their organizations.

Business Process Efficiency (BPE) solutions enable firms to redesign their processes so they can address these challenges and reach their goals. Such tools provide a secure framework in which people can do research, collaborate on key findings, analyze risk, manage content and store documents. By automating business processes, firms can reduce the time and cost of performing important functions, improve efficiency and address the need for governance, risk and compliance.
Microsoft’s MOSS 2007 has emerged as a valuable enabler of BPE. It is a cost-effective way to simplify how people find and share information across boundaries and ultimately make better-informed decisions. Microsoft partners can play a key role by contributing their domain expertise and integrating their applications with an infrastructure that has the potential to transform business.

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Keeping a Clear Head When Working in the Cloud

Competitive demands have changed the financial services industry dramatically over the past several years. New products must speed to market. New and existing services must quickly evolve to keep up with new competitors that are altering the service paradigm with emerging delivery channels. Customers and markets have heightened expectations for unique and varied services, while financial services institutions (FSIs) are pressed to be efficient. All this is occurring amid relentless globalization. To meet these competing demands, the industry has built a virtuous web of human resources, processes, and technologies that must function seamlessly.

Meanwhile, technology has changed the nature of work itself. Workers have had to adapt to new methods of work based on changing business models. Outsourcing of business processes has become common, as have partnerships and alliances featuring collaboration, often across continents. The collaboration is orchestrated by both synchronous and asynchronous work models enabled by interactive technologies. And change will continue at an even more rapid pace as a new generation enters the workforce that has very different expectations than previous generations regarding both the nature of work and the technologies that support it. The expansion of social networking as a means of interaction and the development of a plethora of technologies enable ubiquitous collaboration.

Technology and business have changed simultaneously through a symbiotic relationship in which each responds to opportunities represented by changes in the other. The result has been an overall change in the way people work in a knowledge-based economy. Today, it is not unusual for workers to be part of several ad hoc teams set up to develop and execute specific projects or tasks. The tools needed to execute on the development of new products and services include a secure framework that is a place to share knowledge, collaborate on development, analyze options, manage content, and store documents. Workflow, tracking, monitoring, and governance capabilities are also essential ingredients for successful development and ongoing delivery of a networked workplace where people can meet on a common objective. It is in fulfilling this need that portal technology found its first successes.

Demand for collaboration among greater numbers of people who are widely dispersed in different locations and who all have different expectations defies the tradition of regular hours, common schedules, and even a single technology. Beyond business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions or interaction, the way we work and live has evolved to “business-to-life” (B2L) convergence, in which work, service, and personal lives are converging in a virtual “cloud.” Exhibit 1 outlines the nature of multiple technological formats and ways of interacting that are rapidly becoming integrated.

The trends captured in the exhibit exacerbate the problem of finding a common work environment for internal business operations and in external service delivery. Fortunately, portals are evolving into efficient environments to facilitate B2L convergence. The evolution of the portal as a business process efficiency (BPE) tool has been critical to sustaining ever higher levels of productivity. FSIs are leveraging BPE through internal portals to share business intelligence and information securely across the enterprise any time and from anywhere. External portals can be used by FSIs both to deliver services and to monitor customer interactions with business partners to ensure successful leverage of relationships.

Thus, the continued dispersion of resources, markets, and customers does not mean a dispersion of business results. To the contrary, today’s portal technology offers the security, reliability, flexibility, and intuitive usability both to fulfill internal business needs and to provide seamless delivery of market-facing initiatives.

This article is based on research by the Financial Services Strategies and IT Investments Practice at TowerGroup, a leading research and advisory services firm focused exclusively on the global financial services industry.

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MicroLink Teamwork Solutions Improve Organizational Efficiencies

Financial institutions are looking for a better way to do business. BPE solutions allow them to optimize constrained resources, improve productivity, leverage their IT investments and make better decisions based on current data. Malcolm Hyson, CTO of MicroLink, explains how pre-packaged BPE solutions meet clients’ needs and return a fast ROI.

WFS: How does MicroLink help firms benefit from BPE?

MH: We address problems that are common to most organizations. If a financial institution says they have a document management issue, we solve it by providing them with a pre-packaged scenario based on our experience working in similar environments.

We’re a solution-centric company. We might utilize Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as part of our overall solution architecture, but it’s not the sole product in a typical implementation. We feel that it is more important to take different technology components and combine them to meet the client’s specific business needs.

Our solutions include capabilities such as performance management, dashboarding, metrics and real-time data collection. That’s important because ultimately our goal is to enable our clients to manage their business in real-time. They need to detect issues as they surface so that corrective action can be taken well before the quarterly or yearly report cycles.

We also support customers’ records management and retention needs by helping them comply with regulations such as Sarbanes Oxley. Since companies need to manage content they must have clear data and document retention policies. Our solutions ensure that departmental regulations are followed without forcing users to understand an awkward application.

WFS: How are you working with Microsoft in the BPE arena?

MH: Microsoft products such as SharePoint Server and Exchange started off as fairly closed platforms. Over time they evolved and became great standalone products, but they also are key components of an enterprise development framework.

Moreover, there is a cross-pollination of capabilities across many products. Several Microsoft products enable both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. These allow organizations to connect people in real-time, build com-
munities of knowledge and track progress toward a group objective. MicroLink works with clients to determine when, where and how to use the different components in the Microsoft product lines to meet their business objectives.

In particular, MicroLink delivers a platform using ISA Server for client authentication, Exchange Server on the back end for email, SharePoint Server for asynchronous col-
laboration and Office Communication Server for real-time collaboration. So it comprises multiple products on the back end, but the client receives an integrated solution to meet their needs.

MicroLink won Microsoft’s Repeatable Solutions award in 2008. This recognizes us as a company that can leverage Microsoft technologies and platforms to provide solutions that solve clients’ business problems and can be repeated across multiple engagements. In short, our sweet spot is returning a quick ROI for our clients.

WFS: Can you give an example of a financial organization you’ve worked with?

MH: Currently we’re working with the FDIC to migrate from SharePoint 2003 to MOSS 2007. The goal is for the organization to better manage internal processes and enhance productivity. In particular, the FDIC is refining its records retention policy around how documents are stored and decommissioned after the required retention period.

WFS: How do you see BPE solutions affecting the industry?

MH: As the industry becomes more competitive and the need for innovation grows, we think financial organizations are going to expect more rapid solution development and shorter delivery cycles. That means there will be increased demand for pre-wrapped solutions offered by firms like MicroLink.Secondly, both Microsoft and MicroLink are investing in cloud computing technology. Going forward, we expect many companies will weave together a mixture of internal and external services to create an integrated end solution.

www.microlinkllc.com

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Hyland Software Drives Efficiency With Transactional Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions allow organizations to automate business processes, reduce the time and cost of performing important functions, improve organizational efficiency, and address the need for governance, risk and compliance. Jason King, director of financial services and insurance, and Ken Burns, manager for industry communications at Hyland Software, Inc. explain how financial institutions can realize measurable benefits from this technology.

WFS: What are the drivers behind BPE in financial services?

JK: Financial firms often rely on old technology that can’t adapt to the business needs of the organization. Eventually, productivity is affected, so they start losing money in operations. Their systems can’t keep up with current business demands, and that has a negative impact on customer service. Then they run into other problems when they cannot meet compliance and regulatory requirements.

When investing in core lines-of-business applications to improve process efficiency, many financial institutions overlook the limitations of those systems to handle the steps in a process that takes place outside of those systems. Usually these involve routing and entry of information contained in paper documents that either originate outside the organization or were printed from other internal systems at another point in the process.

Insurers, banks and credit unions look to transactional content management (TCM) applications like document imaging, report management and workflow automation to capture, organize and manage these documents in a central repository.  TCM should be a key component of any overall ECM strategy.  The greatest benefit of a TCM suite is the work that can be done with those documents once they are in the system.

TCM systems act as kind of a middleware. They feature rules-based workflow functionality to automate the routing of related sets of documents and content files to appropriate points in a process, whether that’s a person or another application. They also make it possible to link content-based information to the data records stored in any number of line-of-business applications used in the course of a given process. Instead of a pro­cess worker having to leave their core business application to search for documents related to a particular transaction, a TCM application will enable the employee to retrieve any document they need from within interface of their core applications – all with a single click of a mouse.

ECM is an umbrella term that covers several different flavors of content management applications. Each are optimized for solving a different set of business problems. Our particular flavor is TCM, which manages the relationships between sets of documents associated with a transaction or account. It then associates those sets of files with corresponding data stored in lines-of-business applications such as an LOS or ERP system. TCM also uses workflow and capabilities and automates the processing of those files that would otherwise be handled manually by people.

At the simplest level, think of transactional ECM solutions as allowing you to process and manage your documents in synch with your data.

WFS: What challenges do financial institutions face when it comes to implementing BPE?

KB: Most people are used to working in a paper-based environment, and transactional ECM systems force them to change habits of a lifetime. That’s a significant barrier for organizations to overcome. Interestingly, for all the talk about Web 2.0 technologies, the market for solutions that convert paper-based processes to electronic processes is only about half-saturated. That indicates just how much resistance is out there.

WFS: So how do you help organizations overcome the resistance?

KB: Hyland Software tries to expose our technology and software applications through whatever system end users rely on most. Let’s say an end user accesses documents from the core system to do their job. We’re not trying to compete for desktop space with that core system. We augment it in order to reduce training and resistance to embracing ECM technology.

That’s a big part of what Microsoft is trying to accomplish with SharePoint. It’s adjoining a personal productivity application like Office with an operational productivity application such as a core system or a document management system from Hyland Software. SharePoint provides yet another familiar interface in which to embed those applications.

WFS: How does Hyland Software’s OnBase® solution help firms introduce BPE into their organization?

JK: Once the paper has been digitized, the next logical step is to automate a workflow process and manage a business process using rules and routing capabilities. Hyland Software offers an array of vertically specialized solutions to help accomplish that.

Our solution helps insurers deliver better customer service by reducing claims turnaround time. A document and folder can be automatically routed for resolution, so a claim can be processed in less than 24 hours. Moreover, our software can increase a carrier’s new business underwriting capacity by 40%.

Both commercial and residential lenders benefit by improving efficiency in loan document processing. Our workflow solutions can automatically deliver digitized documents lodged in a central repository to an investor in the secondary market. This minimizes the time it takes to review the paper documents.

A credit union may take advantage of our solution to respond to member queries in real-time. A teller or member service representative can simply look up the digitized transaction records on the system while the member waits.

WFS: Do you have any client examples you can share with us?

JK: Capstone Realty Advisors (Cleveland) services 2,000 existing loans and more than 500 new loans annually. When a new loan closes, Capstone immediately scans the entire file and users access documents in OnBase.

OnBase enabled Capstone to destroy 270 boxes of paper, totaling 1.5 million sheets. The staff has access to 2,000 large loan files across eight locations. Productivity is improved because documents can be viewed simultaneously. In addition, Capstone has improved customer service.

WFS: How are you working with Microsoft to allow financial institutions to take advantage of BPE?

KB: Hyland Software always has been a Microsoft centric organization. In fact, we were among the first vendors 15 years ago to start building document imaging and management software on Windows. Whereas some vendors build software with a Unix back end and a Windows client, our software is built on Windows from back to front so it’s optimized for top performance in a Microsoft environment. Now we’re porting our software architecture completely over to .NET. About 97% of our customers use Microsoft SQL Server for their database and a sig­nificant amount of our integration points are with Microsoft Office. That means firms can take advantage of their Microsoft infrastructure investment using our software.

We’re investing heavily to integrate with and extend Microsoft’s SharePoint platform. Just like Microsoft Office provides a desktop productivity tool on 85% of the desktops in the world today, SharePoint provides those same knowledge workers with pervasive access to collaborative document management and intranet Web capabilities. Hyland Software offers nearly 15 packaged Web parts that expose OnBase functionality through a SharePoint interface. SharePoint can be used as the front end for accessing OnBase, or for using OnBase to scan documents directly into SharePoint.

WFS: What advice do you have for firms who want to implement BPE technologies?

JK: Everybody’s talking about how they can completely transform business with ECM technology, but it’s important to cut through the hype. Hyland Software’s philosophy is to enable our customers to do their job better, faster and deliver superior customer service. If our customers have a specific business pain, we have a solution that can address it. We must be very clear about what we can and cannot do for them.

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