Enhancing Employee Productivity

The JM group, one of India's foremost financial groups and JM Financial
Mutual Fund is the flagship mutual fund company with its head office in Mumbai.
As part of its growth plan, the company wished to have a re-look at its IT
infrastructure to cater to its future growth. It wanted to build an
infrastructure that would be secure, scalable and provide business benefits to
its 125 personnel and later to its customers as well.

Lauren identified that this company needed a solution that could address
issues of employee productivity. Since JM was a loyal customer, it knew that the
senior management of the company was willing to invest in newer technologies
that would help serve their customers better by quick access to information.

Lauren therefore proposed that JM go for an Intranet that would, in the days
to come, be the mainstay application that would bind these diverse
applications that it was employing. Said Neville Dubash, Evangelist-Microsoft
Technologies, Lauren Information Technologies, "Rather than the customer
coming to us with their requirements, we studied their IT infrastructure and
told them how it could be optimized further with this enterprise information
portal."

Setting Up The Solution

The proposed solution consisted of setting up a Microsoft Windows 2003
domain-based infrastructure. This called for the creation of a single forest
Active Directory, to which all resources of the company would get attached.
Strict security policies were put in place to ensure that confidential financial
data is available only to authorized personnel of the company.

Microsoft Exchange 2003 was standardized as the email platform. The mail
server was accessible via the Internet. Windows Share Point services was
deployed as the framework on which the Intranet was built and MS SQL 2000 was
the database that holds the data. The Intranet in phase I consisted of seven
applications, including three workflow applications.

There were several ways how this solution would benefit the customer.
Firstly, users could access mails anytime and from anywhere and all PocketPC-based
PDAs were actively synchronized with mail servers for key personnel. It also
incorporated single-point authentication.

The Intranet was developed with three workflows (Leave, Expense and Travel)
as well as personalization features. It was integrated with JM's core
application, which gave users direct access to industry news and secured access
to shared resources with backup management. The entire project was valued at Rs
42 lakh, including hardware and licenses.

Functionalities Of The Solution

For the first phase, Lauren mapped the requirements of each department and
found that certain areas needed to be seamlessly inter-connected to enhance
productivity. The first was to leverage on the existing legacy applications and
database to a new set that could exploit the Internet, e-commerce, extranet and
other technologies. JM already had applications called the OPS Manager to import
daily reports and NAV List, which imported NAV prices for an external system.

The other aspect of the solution was to remove all manual processes and make
sure that company procedures were followed consistently and completely, for
which Lauren incorporated the workflow automation. There was also the need to
have document and knowledge management, where users could store data, content
and support files. The structure had to organize and manage this knowledge,
presenting it in a user-friendly format. "For instance, if there was a
meeting, there was no provision in the legacy system for the agenda, minutes and
the decision of the meeting to be saved electronically, which could be accessed
by authorized personnel. We created a module for the same," explained
Neville.

A search function was also added to the system, so that users could easily
access documents or information on the Intranet, rather than scan all available
files. The portal was also personalized to enhance user experience by tailoring
pages to individual characteristics. "Employees could define the content
they wanted to view in their personalized area and set notification
preferences," added Neville. The last bit of the solution was a
collaborative workplace, which would allow all

125 users to share information and work concurrently with each other with
modules for discussion forums, opinion polls and event management.

Complexities Involved

The first hurdle that Lauren faced was to convince the customer that this
online portal would indeed translate into employee productivity. JM was earlier
using a static portal, where the systems administrator would periodically upload
files. Lauren had to make the client understand that adding mere dynamism to
this existing setup would not yield results.

Additionally, there was no other Share Point deployment in the country, the
case study of which could be shared with the client. "The Share Point is a
tool from Microsoft which has to be customized for user-specific needs and could
not be implemented out of the box," noted Neville.

Though all this meant that it had to don the mantel of a consultant, the
solution provider did just that and mapped customer benefits and then presented
it to the client. Lauren also had to prioritize critical processes and then
implement these within the solution.

Currently JM is using this Intranet across the board and Lauren even imparted
a three-day training to the staffers to use it. Lauren finished the mapping,
testing and deployment of the project within three months, though it would
ordinarily have taken six man months. Now the client is moving the project into
the second phase, where it will customize it for the needs of various
departments, thus taking it from a macro to a micro-level.

Vinita Bhatia