GE Money
GE Money is an important part of the GE financial division. It provides over 130 million clients from all over the world with credit cards, personal and business loans, loan consolidation, mortgages, mortgage refinancing, investment products, deposits, loan protection insurance, car leasing, or consultancy in the area of obtaining public subsidies for certain projects. Three companies belonging to the GE Money group operate on the Czech market: GE Money Bank, GE Money Multiservis and GE Money Auto.
Initial situation
The growing product portfolio and increasing pressure of the business departments on the time it takes to process a client request have raised a question, whether the current procedures and technologies can meet the new requirements. The links between the particular steps of the process covered several departments and they were not handled adequately; the same went for the handling of the outputs. Unnecessary delays occurred; there was a risk of data loss and processing errors and deviations of standard procedures occured. The existing software platform for processing support was not flexible enough and the off-shore approach towards development was too expensive. It was clear that new means have to be found to automate processes within GE Money - means that would be more flexible, cheaper and would be open for innovation of GE Money customer services.
Project goals
To sustain its development and to improve their service GE Money needed to provide their departments with a better service in the area of product processing, and to speed up the transition towards customer-oriented processes. The goal of the project was to improve efficiency of process handling - to suppress manual work and thus speed up the processing of client requests, while reducing the operational costs per process. Trask was asked to create a software BPM (Business Process Management) platform that would fit in the advanced SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) environment in GE Money and would use as much of the existing IT services as possible. In the long term, the requirement was to provide support for digitalized processing
The Solution
GE Money has chosen Trask solutions to implement the process management platform. The Trask team of specialists has experience from other BPM projects and detailed knowledge of SOA environment in GE Money. The project was viewed as the first stage of the introduction of BPM into the company. Three processes were selected: Enforcements - processing and dispatch of an enforcement order; Insurance - processing of accidents of GE Money Auto clients; X-Sell - processing of marketing proposals to GE Money clients. IBM WebSphere Process Server was selected as the key process management technology and IBM Czech Republic was the main partner for the area of IT architecture and product implementation.
The following were the team's three main areas of interest:
- Selection of a suitable method, analysis, optimization and process design;
- Preparation of business processes for the selected BPM technology;
- Creation of the BPM platform itself and its integration within the existing environment
First of all, the team of processing analysts had to choose the best way to decompose the complex processes into more sensible and easy-to-manage units; and to set the key sections of the processes from the point of view of the required SLA. After that they focused on modeling and design of processing diagrams incl. automated and human activities, links to the organizational structure, modeling of data entities that enter the process and their storage during the process lifecycle. The technological team focused on the complex design of the solution architecture, its integration and conversion of the selected processes into an automatically executable form. Thanks to the high level of SOA implementation in GE Monay and thanks to the large amount of IT services provided it was easy to automate the processes as necessary. The final solution offers over 80 services for process management than can be called. These services are used by other systems (for example: the scanning line starts new Enforcement process automatically when an enforcement order is received). The users interact with the processes using a common screen through the uniform user interface of the UFO system. This system also communicates with the processes by calling services above the BPM solution (e.g. obtaining a list of tasks of a given user, reading the task details, completing the task, etc.).
Key benefits
Easy end-to-end management and monitoring of processes
The processes that were the first to be introduced have unified the (until now) scattered steps into a consolidated management frame; let the company monitor the status of the processing and store the process history and data.
Automation - Over 60% of the manual steps are now automated
The processes were optimized and on average 60% of the manual steps were replaced by automatic processing.
Proactive management of employee workload
The remaining activities, where user interaction is necessary, are automatically generated and distributed among personal and team task queues by the BPM system. That is how the employee and team work is managed according the task priorities and their current workload.
Environment for processing applications - Automated processes now 50% faster and cheaper
As the first stage of the project was finished, GE Money has gained a fully integrated foundation for other processes to be easily added to. From the IT point of view it is a platform that allowed - instead of the development of more and more single-purpose applications - the company to focus on process management and to model and introduce a process using the existing IT services. Introduction of IT support of the new business activities, along with the changes to the existing processes, have become cheaper and faster by up to 50% compared to the original situation.
BPM Know-How in GE Money
Thanks to the fact that GE Money was well involved in the initial project, their processing team has enough knowledge from the field of process analysis, and can design new processes with minimum assistance from an external supplier.
Reduction of workload and faster process execution
By introducing software support of business processes we have managed to reduce the workload for their processing, the time it takes to execute them and the error rate. Nowadays, when keeping the costs low while improving the client services is crucial these benefits constitute an inconsiderable advantage over competition.
Apart from other positive impacts as the increase of GE Money agility, the introduction of BPM activities with the support of a software platform means another important benefit for GE Money: an environment was created that provides better and narrower communication between business and IT departments regarding the execution of processes and their support within the company. We consider this communication to be essential for the future development of the company towards their clients..
Milan Petráň | BPM Manager for Trask solutions
Further development
Trask introduced the process management solution into GE Money in May 2008 and, gradually, the first three processes were presented - Insurance (accidents), X-Sell (marketing offers) and Enforcements (enforcement orders).
Nové procesy z různých oblastí
Počet procesů a procesních aplikací nad touto platformou se od té doby postupně rozrůstá o nové procesy z různých oblastí jako operations, řízení rizik, řízení dokumentů a nově například procesy pro řízení agendy datových schránek.
" When dealing with data boxes to confirm the correctness of the chosen strategy before implementation of automated technology management processes in an SOA. Since we moved in to us already known environment, we succeeded in cooperation with experts of Trask within 2 months from the start of the analytical work on the business side get the first functional version of the solution. In addition, the solution is ready to take control of all incoming correspondence - from arrival at the registry after the execution of a responsible employee. "
Tomáš Vojtíšek | Senior Project Manager GE Money - Operations
New processes from various areas
The number of processes and processing applications using this platform has been growing since then. New processes from various fields were implemented - such as operations, risk management, document management and management of electronic data mailbox agenda.
When looking into the area of electronic data mailboxes, the strategy of selecting the automated process management technology in a SOA architecture environment proved to be correct. As the environment was already well-known to us, we have managed - in cooperation with Trask specialists - to introduce the first functional version of the solution within only 2 months after the start of the analytic work. Moreover, this solution can take over the control of any incoming correspondence - from its receipt in the registry up to its execution by the responsible employee.
Tomáš Vojtíšek | Senior Project Manager for GE Money - Operations
Process introduction within weeks
The ongoing development of the platform, its extension with other processes and the resulting improved know-how has allowed GE Money to consider introduction of new processes to be a routine activity. Therefore, it is possible to get from a "paper process design" to live operations using automated processing platform within just a few weeks.
The experience from implementation of the first processes has shown us the direction we would like to take. Creating an internal team of IT specialists who have managed to master the principles and procedures for optimal automated process design has proven to be the right decision that can speed up and reduce the costs of the project significantly. Nowadays, together with the colleagues from business departments and Trask specialists we focus on evaluating the benefits of the already-implemented processes and their possible optimization in the future.
Pavlína Kouklíková | IT Manager - Data Architecture, GE Money