For many years one of the UK’s largest financial institutions had been using a tried and trusted paper forms-based system to manage changes to pension policies.

This involved the use of 280 different forms that were filled in by hand and then moved around the organisation as part of an approvals process. Once approved the forms were couriered each day to a separate location where they were batched and the information keyed into a proprietary system run by a bureau service. This service formatted the data according to a complex set of rules and then output it as mainframe-compatible files that were uploaded into the organisation’s back office systems.

The Challenge

Not surprisingly the whole business process was expensive, time-consuming and prone to errors - either during the filling in of forms or later when the data was re-keyed. Mistakes were difficult to rectify, and involved sending the errant form back to its originator, re-entering the information on a new form and then resubmitting it to keying staff.

Whilst the proprietary hardware could operate for the foreseeable future, any change to the process was difficult and the system required specialist staff to run it. Furthermore, the lease on the building housing the hardware was coming to an end.

Payment to the bureau was by keystroke - and there were 120 million of these a year! New business growth in one product area had stretched the capacity of this system and was restricting future development of the organisation.

In addition, because of the need to courier forms to the bureau and then have them keyed before close of business, the cut-off point for form processing during any one day was 12pm - severely restricting the scope of operations and speed of response.

The need was to keep the existing back-office mainframe systems, which would have been to expensive and time-consuming to replace, but streamline the delivery of information from the business into these systems.

The Solution

The company undertook a complete review of the processes involved and decided to replace the existing system with an e-Forms Business Process Management (BPM) solution. This needed to be web-based for easy deployment to the 700+ users, support high-availability and scalability, and allow integration with other systems.

Following a review of available solutions, Cardiff Software’s LiquidOffice BPM suite was chosen. The project was split into 2 phases - the first phase dealing with simple fill and submit forms that had no financial implications, and the second phase involving far more complex forms and processes that included extensive financial approval controls.

Coordinatis was selected to implement the second phase because of its experience in implementing BPM solutions. Two major global outsourcing consultancies were also involved in the project, as well as the client’s own analysts and project managers.

Due to delays in the decision-making process, a severe time constraint was placed on the project because of the building lease deadline. The client faced financial penalties if they were unable to complete the implementation in time, calling for innovative design and project management choices.

Working with the in-house team, and consulting extensively with business users, Coordinatis staff analysed the different forms, their business rules and the processes involved as part of an information gathering exercise. Very little about the current process was documented and so extensive discussions with different parties across the business were required.
 
The processes touched various different departments and functions so agreement and approval also had to be sought from each of these for the changes proposed. Finally, a comprehensive set of Application Specifications were completed that documented every aspect of the new forms, the business rules, the processes to be used and the translation of data into mainframe files - ready for signoff by the business.

The Coordinatis team then developed the electronic forms and workflows that implemented all of the requirements and business rules, and which included such features as:

• Automatic batching of forms.
• Adaptive forms that could represent various different transaction types.
• Extensive validation rules.
• Management of complex financial signoff limits.
• Incorporation of electronic signatures.
• Automatic generation of end of day cash totals in a master form.
• Export of form data to a back-end database

The forms were deliberately made to look and feel like the existing paper forms so that training requirements were limited.

Financial approval was a particularly complex area. For each transaction type a different set of criteria needed to be applied in order to manage the rights to sign off financial amounts, and the limit of those amounts. These varied per person depending of the type of pension or action involved and the circumstances surrounding it. The rules were stored in a separate database and queries developed for accessing these from within the forms or workflow steps.

Once forms had been approved, their data was automatically exported into a back-end database. Custom-written batch software was then developed to extract this data and write it out to files in the format required by the back-office mainframe systems.

The Results

Not surprisingly, users immediately took to the new system and the solution has been declared a great success. The benefits were extensive:

• Substantial reduction in costs and the time taken to process policy changes.
• Simplification of business processes.
• Extension of the daily processing deadline from 12pm to 4pm ensuring faster processing.
• Management of complex financial signoff limits.
• Reduction in data entry errors and resulting errors in policy details.
• Automatic generation of end of day cash totals in a master form.
• Improvements in the calculation, management and signoff of daily banking totals.
• Enhanced control over financial approval limits. Under the old system any breach of approval limits was only occasionally detected through spot checks. The new system has ensured complete compliance with business rules.
• High process reliability and scalability.
• Solution delivered within a short timeframe.

As a result this financial institution has been able to take a highly effective incremental approach to improving its processes, allowing for future business expansion whilst retaining existing back-office systems.