Case Study- SSC BPM Solution

Background

The Group is an Indian Conglomerate Company with presence in infrastructure sector, power system production and electronics products manufacturing.

Company felt the need for leveraging a new finance operating model with SSC providing transaction processing services to group entities with the below objectives:

• Automate a number of their mission-critical financial systems processes.

• Standard, consistent process to manage the approval procedure to ensure control and accuracy of information.

• Increase Customer Satisfaction by focusing on business partnering and insightful reporting.

• Build Scalable finance organization to support business growth.

Business Challenge: Productivity Bottlenecks and Increased Risks

Finance functions at most group entities were heavily skewed towards transaction processing due to duplication of efforts, legacy systems and error prone.

Key Challenges:

• Time Consuming and Manually Intensive

- F&A process was very labor intensive as the accounting department had to manually track invoices, enter data, and send the invoices to the appropriate supervisors for approval.

• Error and Delayed Payment Prone

- The manual process was error prone and accounting staff spent time tracking down errant invoices and performing non-core tasks, rather than accounting functions.

• Lack of Visibility and Control

- Lack of ability to identify trends such as cycle time and ability to see what financial obligations were open and where the responsibility laid.

PwC Approach

Accounts Payable

• Scan the invoices and upload in the system• Index the invoices• Verification by AP SSC executive • Initiate and execute workflow for approval of the invoices using

predefined rules• Dispute resolution steps for rejected invoices• Batch mode integration with SAP and RAMCO

Fixed Assets• Record FA scrap transaction• Maintain documentation of FA sale

Accounts Receivable• Ability to upload SOP• Verification by AR SSC executive• Dispute resolution by issue resolution team

Generic Features

• Generation of reports• User and role specific task board• Administration features to maintain master data• User authentication through Active Directory• Audit log of all activities performed• Email notifications

Automation of Accounts Payable, Fixed Assets Disposal and Accounts Receivable processes in order to streamline the activities, improve control and prevent loss of information. The automation is across all the group entities and the automated system should be able to interact with the underlying ERP systems . The overall functionality implemented in these automated processes are following:

Automate processes through an overlay of Workflow and Document Management Solution

Software License Type Description Version

Apache Open Source Webserver 2.2

Java Open Source Software Development Kit 1.7

Liferay Open Source Portal Server 6.1

MySQL Open Source Database 5.6

Camunda BPM Open Source BPM workflow engine 7.1

JBoss Open Source Java Application Server 7.1

Alfresco Open Source Document Management System 4.2

Quartz & Spring Batch Open Source Java-based job-scheduling API 2.2

Jasper Reports Open Source Java-based Reporting Engine 5.1

MongoDB Open Source No-SQL Database 2.2

Open LDAP Open Source LDAP Server 2.4

Maven Open Source Build Tool for BPM Artifacts

Software Stack

Amara Raja Group • F&A SSC: Technology Landscape and AMS considerations

8

The Solution

Camunda Chosen As BPM and Workflow Platform

In applying Camunda BPM to this process, PwC sought a technology platform that would provide simple power by combining extreme ease of use with comprehensive functionality.

• Open source BPM-engine

• Processes are BPMN 2.0

- standard for modeling(executable) processes

• Integrated suite of components including process design, rules, forms, reporting, identity management and collaboration.

• Lightweight, embeddable, testable and extensible.

BusinessAnalyst

Developer

BusinessModeler

Cycle

File Repository

Camunda Modeler

Task ListCustom

ApplicationCockpit

Rest Rest/Java

Rest/Java API

Process Engine

Database

Rest

Process Participant Technical/Business

Monitoring & Operations

Components

Key Enablers :

Camunda Modeler

Modeling tool

Camunda Modeler is a BPMN 2.0 modeling plugin for the Eclipse IDE

Key Enablers :

Cockpit

Process Monitoring tool

• Aggregates the state of all instances of a process definition and visualizes it on the process diagram

• Displays how many instances are currently waiting in each task / activity.

• Inspect/repair process instances, including retrying failed service calls.

• Create instance variables at runtime, and update variable values.

• Reassign human activities.

Business Drivers

• To reduce the end-to-end cycle-time of core business processes and optimize cost of operations

Reduce Cycle Time

• To establish automated rule-based controls and workflows for improving employee productivity

Improve Productivity

• To enable a holistic view of the business processes to the stakeholders across rank and departments – provisioning engineers, field engineers, leadership and management across order management, service provisioning, service assurance and invoice processes

Enable holistic view

of Process

• To develop an agile process management framework for quick turn-around of new services and products to be offered to customers

Quick go-to-market

• To monitor performance of business processes real-time and identify bottlenecks

Monitor Performance

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Approach & Methodology in action

Capture AS-IS process

Model TO-BE process focusing on the business goals

Simulate TO-BE process

Model Execute Measure Orchestrate

Processes

Manage Work Tasks

Manage Business Data

Define Measures

Collect Data

Report

Monitor Measures

Implement Define data and

activities

Identify and develop Integrations

Develop Executable processes

BPM inherently offers Quick Go-to-market through

enabling short model-to-execute cycle

Enable holistic view of Process

Reducing cycle-time and Improving productivity through proper analysis and modeling of the business processes

Monitor performance through KPI Dashboards

... and the framework for

Camunda In Action- Credit/Debit Note Process

Key Benefits

• Automatic routing to supervisors for approval.

• Round Robin allocation of tasks.

• Drools Rule Engine for LOA based routing decisions.

• Flexibility for approvers to seek clarification from any prior approver on that CN/DN and task

returning to the same person once clarification is provided.

• Email notifications related to assignment, approval/clarification at each process step.

• Task audit trail.

Camunda In Action- Receipting Process

Key Benefits

• Automated SOP Validation on a granular level.

• Automated exception handling for incomplete or incorrect SOPs.

• SOP Task Routing based on Validation result.

• Sub-Process to process the task on a granular level and minimize the error.

Camunda In Action- Reporting Metrics

Key Benefits

• Custom plugin for creating dashboard.

• Displays the number of process instances per deployed process definition on the dashboard page of

cockpit based on their state- Failed, Running and Ended.

• Displays the instances sum per process definition.

Benefits Realisation

• 75% increase in employee productivity. Fewer errors and reduced cost

• Automatic validation of Receipting SOPs

Reduce Cycle Time

• Automation and Streamlining of end-to-end Accounting Process.

• Automatic routing to supervisors for approval.

• Business Logic written in Drools spreadsheets for business logic segregation and faster deployments.

• Escalation of Invoices which crossed due date.

Improve Productivity

• Manage process in real time via, automatic work allocation, reminders, notifications and escalations to improve visibility of the business processes

• 100% liability tracking and process transparency.

Enable holistic view

of Process

• Existing investments in core systems have been protected by gradually integrating with underlying services

Quick go-to-market

• Monitor process KPIs in real time via dashboards to improve visibility and insight on business performance

• Ability to analyze data to make critical financial decisions.

Monitor Performance

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Other Key Benefits achieved

• Flexibility to model and execute processes which include both human and automated tasks in a workflow

• Improve Workflow Transparency, Collaboration and Quality

• Eliminate/reduce routine low value added work using automation

• Improve Exception Management

• Monitor and Manage Process in real time via dashboards, automatic work allocation, reminders, notifications and escalations to improve insight on business performance

• Enable Continuous Process Improvement and Future proof IT investment by using industry standard process modelling using BPMN standard

• Protect existing investments in core systems by integrating with underlying services

Thank You!

debopam.deb@in.pwc.com

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