Brainstorm Magazine

Productivity: Glacier's Hewan McCann says the company's BPM implementation has allowed it to cut its resource requirement.

A business refocus and need to manage SLAs led local financial services company Glacier to implement a BPM solution.

Glacier (or more fully, Glacier by Sanlam) was launched as a means for Sanlam Life to target the more affluent segment of the retail investment market. This change of focus for the company, previously called Innofin, resulted in a need to consolidate its systems and streamline its business processes.

Says Glacier associate director – IT, Hewan McCann: “We identified the need to expand our service range by bringing additional products onto the platform, and to manage SLAs with product providers. In order to achieve this, we needed a process-driven solution to manage that for us. We had an in-house workflow system but not a solution that could manage the end-to-end processes, SLAs with vendors and the SLAs needed internally to provide the level of service required.”

Having acquired a mandate from Sanlam to go ahead with implementing an appropriate solution, Glacier started looking.

Says McCann: “We investigated a number of different products (we didn’t have a huge budget) and found Metastorm. Compared to the others, it looked like it would provide the solution we needed. We ran a pilot to test integration with the back end systems on the mainframe as well as its ability to integrate with external providers. If a process had to extend outside the company, it was important that the selected technology could handle that and integrate into the existing front end systems as well.

“We ran a three-week pilot to look at those aspects, which was successful, so we knew it could do what we needed it to do. We decided to go with the product because of price, functionality and the lack of availability of another system that provided the same features.

Due to the need to implement within a restricted time frame, we couldn’t do a six-month pilot, which would have given a higher level of confidence,” he says, noting that the BPM project was one project in a whole programme of projects at the time.

Point-to-point

The project kicked off with the consultants sitting with the business and mapping business processes in detail in the Metastorm process designer.

Says McCann: “We mapped our existing process as well as the “to be” processes for the new products. We had an existing workflow system that we needed to replace, so we required one system to handle all existing and new processes.

The end result was a list of processes that needed to go through the new system. “Glacier started an IT project at the same time, which involved looking at integration tools in order to get all electronic faxes and e-mails into the BPM system. The requirement was to invoke the correct business process using the electronic document and associated index data as a trigger.”

The project ran for a total of 15 months, McCann says, from February 2006 to May 2007, and included getting the processes built, and integrating with a browser-based front-end portal. It included enabling single sign-on, so users don’t need to sign in more than once when moving between the portal and BPM systems. It also enabled integration into the e-mail and fax systems so that both could be received electronically and integrate seamlessly from a user perspective.

The system went live with 103 detail level processes in May 2007.

Says McCann: “At that point, we up-skilled our staff so they could continue to support the system, independent of the vendor.”

Rewriting a legacy

McCann says the company has done a lot of maintenance to the system. “Users have identified things we could improve, processes we could tweak, etc, so we’ve been in maintenance/ renewal mode since.” Glacier has made in excess of 50 smaller changes, he notes, and put three larger initiatives in place.

“One is providing operational management information systems from the BPM database to enable the business managers to measure the effectiveness of individuals. “We have also built a facility to provide intermediaries (such as brokers) with an online system so they can monitor all the work sent to us in real time.”

Long term, says McCann, the plan is to look at replacing the remaining legacy systems with a fully integrated BPM solution using Metastorm as the engine. At a certain point the company’s processes still go into the legacy system, which it would like to replace by mid-2011.

“The main benefit to Glacier was the ability to add SLAs and have monitoring in place.

All that has been achieved. There has not been a drive to measure financial savings, but as a result of this project and other efficiencies gained, we’ve been able to save on resource requirements by not filling ten vacancies in the processing team,” he concludes.