Case Study: HDFC Bank

By automating a process, one can reduce manual interventions and reduce the
discretionary powers vested with people, thus leading to uniformity of service.
At HDFC Bank, this was the prime motivation to go in for a BPM solution.

In the past, the bank had implemented quite a few workflow solutions but
these were largely departmental and not enterprise-wide. The bank observed that
in a typical process like loan approvals that were transactions requiring some
skill-level, there was always a skew in terms of resource utilization in that
these services had to be offered at various locations. If work could be moved
from branches to central locations, the skill levels required at branches would
be low.

An imaging solution partly solved the problem, but if workflow management
were added, the process could get more automated, the management thought.

“We studied a whole lot of solutions for eight months before zeroing in on BPM” Anand Narayan  V-P, IT, HDFC Bank

Says Anand Narayan, V-P, IT, HDFC Bank, "We took about eight months to
study a whole lot of solutions available ranging from document imaging, document
management systems, workflow management, and BPM." Specifically, some of
the products that were evaluated were- MQWorkFlow, Lotus Notes WorkFlow, and
Content Manager Domino-Doc from IBM and Staffware Process Suite v 2 from
Staffware. The choice ultimately fell on Staffware because of its completeness
of approach, right from the stage of defining the business process itself.

The bank started small–with just the trade finance area–and it took about
four months to implement the Staffware Process Suite v2. Reportedly, several new
projects are in the pipeline.

The bank has already seen optimal utilization of resources, better turnaround
time, along with uniformity of service levels and also the ability to provide
differentiated service levels depending on customer profile. The BPM solution
helps the bank to change or amend processes on the fly and also dynamically
reallocate work. Another benefit is a centralized audit trail of each workstep,
leading to better auditing control and process-related MIS.