Coforge helps a Fortune 500 Investment Management company become more process efficient.

Challenges.

The client faced the fundamental challenge of daily reconciling alternate asset investments between multiple systems, including third parties. This task accounted for just 10-15% of the workload by volume but required a significant proportion of the team’s effort.

The data for reconciliation was distributed across multiple sources like PDFs, Excel, and emails. Reconciling data from various sources made the output error-prone and time-consuming.

Moreover, there was a lack of application integration. Working with data in disparate applications made the daily tasks labor-intensive.

In addition, there was a high dependency on key Subject Matter Experts, which posed an increased business risk and engaged them in non-value-added tasks.

A few more challenges added to the daily chaos:

• Having different sets of reconciliation rules between processes.
• Lack of systemic guidance to drive and monitor the reconciliation efforts. The client had an oversight on the time this aspect consumed.
• High level of manual pre-processing and formatting of PDFs and spreadsheets, which compounded the time consumed.

Solution.

Coforge conducted an in-depth process assessment to drive efficiencies by improving and simplifying their complex processes. Risk reduction and mitigation were also an integral part of the delivery. Toward this objective, the ProcessGym^TM team studied the entire value chain within 8 weeks to undertake a comprehensive review and improvement initiative. This initiative included the following steps:

• Reviewing and documenting “as-is” processes performed by the business unit and other units providing inputs specifically from a quality and efficiency perspective.
• Analyzing data thoroughly to define initial SLA/KPI and other metrics and generating a risk rating heatmap to visualize potential risks.
• Providing recommendations across people, process, and technology dimensions.
• Performing cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the financial impact and providing a roadmap to guide the transformation process.

We aimed to simplify complex processes, create business value, and reduce risks. The following actions helped us achieve our goals:

• We recommended offshoring the simple processes, enabling client SMEs to concentrate on value-added work and assist in implementing. transformations. The recommendation also included short-term measures such as addressing and mitigating critical risks and issues by implementing a quality framework, Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• We adopted the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) model to offshore simple processes. We built an offshore team that operated the client business as usual and later transferred the offshored processes to the client.
• As a short-term implementation, a scalable solution over a 6-month timeframe was suggested. This solution leveraged Intelligent Automation (IA), Machine Learning (ML), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate services. This initiative transitioned to a volume-based managed service operating model that focused on outcomes rather than resources.
• A new recon tool was recommended to speed up the reconciliation process.
• A dashboard showcasing real-time data sets and KPIs was delivered.
• Lastly, Coforge recommended including a long-term strategic solution designed to support future growth aspirations.

The impact.

• The BOT model freed the SMEs to perform their core business and participate in transformation activities.
• Nearly 40+ processes were automated through RPA, Macros, Scripts, minor changes, modifying current applications, and OCR.
• The automation made the tasks easier and less time-consuming.
• The new recon tool enabled further automation and data analysis. It helped achieve a 90% more efficient matching of all portfolio cash balances and items.
• Enabled an estimated cost savings of 45% over a 5-year duration.
• The dashboard enabled transparency and data-driven decision-making.