Overview
Our client is a global financial intelligence innovator providing world-class index, analytics and risk solutions that optimize investment impact. The company delivers sophisticated and targeted solutions at scale to empower its clients – financial product issuers, capital owners and asset managers – to meet the unique and increasingly demanding sustainability goals of global investors. The primary solutions offered are world-class indices and best-of-breed analytics related to financial products and markets.
Included in the services, the company offers the ability of its clients to submit new customization requests, as well as tweaks, changes and enhancements to the existing indices. To align with the pre-defined product roadmap, internal business stakeholders engage in the delivery of internally driven changes. All such requests must be vetted, approved or denied, prioritized and then executed (if approved) or meticulously documented. Each step in this process needs to be coordinated and tracked. With 200+ requests coming in yearly, the firm partnered with HCLTech to simplify and streamline what had become an arduous manual process.
The Challenge
Outdated tools and processes disrupting efficiency
Mapped in a flowchart format, the end-to-end internal process for managing all the requests included a dizzying number of steps, approval requirements and checks & balances prior to execution.
- Outdated systems: They relied on two disconnected legacy systems, one for the incoming request process and one for executing approved changes. The two systems didn’t talk to one another.
- Low user adoption: Request initiators lacked the incentive to enter their requests in the former tool, leading to disruptions in the request management process.
- Poor tracking system: Stakeholders relied on their individual email accounts for tracking, creating a risky and unsustainable manual process
The Objective
Achieving maximum efficiency and scalability
The company wanted to transform their request management ecosystem to simplify workflows, improve KPIs and increase transparency for data-driven decision making. The company contracted HCLTech with three key goals:
- Simplify, streamline and automate: The entire process, from incoming requests to final execution – and every step in between.
- KPI improvements: They sought to reduce processing time and errors
- Increase transparency: Improve transparency in product and sales pipelines to empower leadership to make data-driven and effect-based decisions
The business will continue to use Jira as their preferred tracking software, so they also brought to the project a requirement that any status updates recorded within Jira-based tasks be fed back to Dataverse, where all the data from incoming requests (and ensuing end-to-end-business process) was stored. Understandably, this integration was more a mandate than a goal.
The Solution
Integrated Power Platform to maximize effectiveness
HCLTech used Power Apps and Power Automate to architect the solution with two key components. This ultimately replaced their outdated process, starting with the front-end client experience and culminating with an automated back-end internal process.
- Canvas app: A super-intuitive client interface that helps the system create new requests, view existing requests, interact with dashboards, providing data highlights and insights into the pipeline. Upon clicking + Create request, the user is presented a series of fields to populate, most of which are single-click dropdowns. Once the request is submitted, it is fed to Dataverse for storage and the internal business process is initiated. It is a tremendous improvement to the requester experience that inherently enhances the overall request management process.
- Model-driven app: Combined with several workflows developed in Power Automate, the model-driven app streamlines and automates the entire review + approval/denial + prioritization + execution process. It's not a simple matter of a single approval. Their process requires several layers of reviews, multiple approvals and a series of negotiations and business decisions related to prioritization. Importantly, all of that occurs within the app, with each next stage automatically triggered by the completion of the previous. All activity is fed to Dataverse.
- Tracking software integration (Jira): As this process unfolds, Jira migration is approaching, following which all employees will be expected to update statuses and details in Jira. Critically, those updates would also be fed to Dataverse so all the information from multiple systems is stored in one location. When applicable, the solution will pull Jira data from Dataverse into the model-driven app, eliminating duplicate entries and the need to review multiple systems when making real-time business decisions.
The Impact
An improved experience with 20% faster processing
The client was able to achieve time optimization, improved efficiency, enhanced analytics and a future-ready foundation.
- The process was centralized and optimized by the request management application, increasing productivity and user satisfaction
- Having all request-related data in one place allows for generating insightful dashboards and reports thus resulting in 20% decrease in processing time within 270 days
- Established a framework for the automation of manual procedures, allowing for increased productivity and strategic emphasis
HCLTech helped the client establish a foundation for data-driven insights and future automation capabilities. Based on the success of this project, they plan to continue partnering with HCLTech on additional business-critical initiatives. “With the introduction of the request management tool,” says the company's COO, “we have established a solid basis for further automation of manual business processes.”
