Quality Fables Competition 2018

The Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Life Insurance business was livid and blurted “How the heck did this village bumpkin crack my system to do this fraud. This can’t go on. We will be ruined and our reputation will be lost”. The complexity of the fraud really stared at him. “We need to find a solution to prevent this and also support the business to grow exponentially”.

The Group Head Risk, could empathise with him and he made a bold statement “Let my crack team give you a solution that will give you peace and let you focus on the business”. The confidence and energy was suddenly high and the challenge appeared conquerable.

Being in retail business, the private Life Insurance service provider operates in a very competitive environment and frauds eat into the profitability.

Customers from all walks of life can take insurance cover and have different requirements, intentions and behaviour. It is challenging to manually understand and identify fraudulent intentions (aka greed) of a large range of customers.

COO team observed many patterns in historical fraud cases ranging from increased propensity of fraud during month-end pressure, to the role of collusion among distributor agency and involvement of doctors.

A multifunctional team with domain experience and knowledge was formed to create an innovation solution for identification of fraud and provide early warning signals.

Machine learning tools and artificial intelligence tools along with Statistical best practices were combined powerfully to create the innovative solution that had scalability. A two pronged attack of analysis of past cases and emerging fraud patterns through outlier detection techniques was rolled out.

Once a fraudulent pattern has emerged in a particular region the model could learn and predict similar trends in other regions and immediately raise a red flag for the same. Several ratios were identified that were used to identify potential red flags of a fraudster. The Machine learning could identify several such behaviour patterns that now could be recognised as suspects for further investigation. The model helped us in identifying the wolf in sheep’s clothing i.e. could sieve a fraudster from genuine customers.

By adopting the innovation model we could sieve the bad customers from good one, thereby reducing the cost of poor quality (prevention cost, failure cost). It also improved the TAT for processing, as good customers were allowed straight through approvals and thereby greater customer satisfaction and reputation.

The COO called the Group Head and said “Thank you for making the fraudsters Rest in Peace (RIP). You have really taken this monkey off my back”. There were smiles around and a sense of readiness for what could lie ahead.

60 year old Anandibai from PatilPada was running a continuous high grade fever since 3 days. She had heard about the big city hospital that came to the village with a big van where the doctors provided free treatment and medicines. On her 1^st visit the doctors examined her, did her blood tests and gave her medicines to take for the next week. She was asked to follow up after five days of taking medicines and instructed to get all the documents with her on her next visit.

Five days later, she visited the doctor again but without the papers.It was a rainy week and her house got flooded and the medical papers were destroyed. The doctor was perplexed! He saw over 250 patients a week and was not sure of the diagnosis and treatment given to Anandibai since he did not have any backup documentation. So the entire process of history taking, examination, etc. was repeated!

The doctor was hassled; this was the 9^th case of the day where the patient failed to bring along the medical records.

The Rural health programme in-charge realised that this was a repetitive issue and needed to be tackled on a war footing. Another problem he came across was that because of the paper records given to the patients, data analysis was very difficult. Lot of man-hours went into data mining and that too was not 100% accurate. This data would be very important to start any new programmes or create any new specialized facilities.

In this regard the team planned to build a module through which the data can be entered , stored , viewed and monitored over a period of time.The team with the help of Hospital IT Dept , started exploring various possibilities of developing the module which will serve the purpose and user friendly.the IT team started roping in different vendors who fit the criteria and can deliver according o the expectation of the hospital. After lots of scrutiny , the vendor was finalized.Post finalizing the vendor , discussions began for the roadmap of implementing the module. The replica of the current form and various activities of the programme were shared with the development team.After multiple discussions and meetings , a final draft of the module was out which was then shared with rest of the team for further inputs.

Pilot run was initiated with the rural team so as to test the viability and functionality. Certain inputs were received from the team which were shared with development team for upgradation.The team met for discussion of the pros and cons of this module and how to solve the queries.

The planning for Go Live of this project was started after the success of the pilot run. All the team members were called and the date was announced for the final day. Finally the day came when the module was officially launched and open to use for the team. The team started using the same . The feedback was satisfactory.

The system is running successfully and has benefitted all.Thus the aim of being eco friendly with  an ability to view and retrieve historic data , capture and monitor critical modalities and treat patients accordingly was achieved.

Anitha was admitted in the special private ward in a multispeciality hospital. This particular ward in the hospital boasted of facilities on par with a five star hotel. The rooms were air-conditioned single rooms with a remote controlled beds, microwave, television, nurse calling facility et al.

The patient and their attendee’s have options to choose from the set menu and also to order food on alacarte basis. Anitha ordered for a masala dosa, but was provided with an idli-sambar.

This information was shared with the floor manager who in turn gets in touch with the dietary in charge to handle this specific complaint. He also has to check with the dietary staff to verify if the complaint was handled to the patient’s satisfaction.

   This leads to a delay in the time frame for resolution of complaints. Similarly other patient related complaints pertaining to the rooms and facilities were handled in silos and independently.

We brought in a lot of changes in terms of patient service experience including a manager for the floor, dedicated dietary supervisor for the floor, dedicated customer relation executives to take feedbacks from all patients on that floor.

This also resulted in multiple staff visiting the patient at different times during the day to collect feedback about the different services offered, thereby disturbing the patients at multiple times during the day.

However we realised that we had a long way to go in terms of satisfying the patient and there was no reduction in the number of complaints received from these patients.

We brainstormed on the problem internally and we realised that we could work as a TEAM to handle this issue better. This resulted in the inception of the “EXCLUSIVE GRAND ROUNDS”. This team comprised of the nurse manager, customer relations executive and the dietary in charge and floor manager. 

We have a team visiting the patient on a daily basis and communicating with the patients regarding the patient experience on a daily basis with respect to each of their areas and taking measures on a real-time basis so the patient feels the compassion that we as a hospital stand for. This resulted in the team being sensitized to all the issues faced by the patient on a daily basis and taking our patient experience to a different level.

Excel and PowerPoint are good colleagues, theyunderstand each other and coexist very well. They’re supportive, hardworking and collaborative.Due to this, they believed that they’re the only ones who can provide any sort of analysis and visualisation. And our homo was in love with them, albeit a lot of struggle.

The stage is set for our annual ‘Customer Satisfaction Survey'. Tonnes of customer data over years flows into the analysis. Excel boasted of interesting formula and charts which the homo really liked. But, in the end, excel and power point had a bit of rivalry going on—bothwere jealous of each other’s features making it tough for the homo to seamlessly flow the data between. Excel was flexible but lacked visual appeal. Power point had lustre but lacked flexibility.

Our homo spent sleepless nights to ensure that data is correct and well formatted. But, during the presentations, there were mismatches. CSAT had many dissections and needed multiple viewsfor different stakeholders. Working on the same visualizations for different teams was the reason for this data mismatch. This dentedthe credibility of the entire process. This entire effortwas two months of hard work for both, and our homo. The homo started getting frustrated about the relationship and asked the duo "Why don’t you talk better to each other and make my life better?”. The Excel-PowerPoint duo had their own reasons not to.

After six years of struggle, a new person walked into the company. He looked stylish, well-built and had confidence in him. He was a fresher. Our homo noticed this smart guy and decidedto give him a try. He fundamentally questioned why should PowerPoint be the pair to excel? Why can it be a Power BI. He started a pilot. Every day, he brought in new charts, new patterns, to which the homo gave a try. Thus, Power BI and Excel teamed up with the past two years’ data to understand how quickly the analysis can be set up. Power BI grabbed everything and projected it almost live.

Now Power BI has the design of views even before the start of survey. It takes more and more data dimensions and provides brilliant correlations.Once the survey window closes and excel pushes the survey data, homo receives a first draft quickly.Power BIalso gives homo the comparison views with previous years. Hurray! The data is correct and can be drilled down at will. All the leadership gets data at the same time as per their span of control.

The difference this made? Work that used to take 2 months of effort came down to just 2 days!

A real estate eCommerce giant from US, started with Brillio by outsourcing a small project with just 5 members.  Now the engagement has grown to a thriving 150+ member team.  This relationship had equal share of aha moments and challenges. 

A new CEO took charge and was gearing up for biggest digital transformation ever.  They were sure that Brillio could be an ideal partner but were also clear that Brillio should up their game as well. Customer was tightening the process of making every digital investment prioritized vis-à-vis its value and results. Expectations from us were growing day by day and so were the challenges.  More stakeholders were showing interest with multiplicity of perspectives.

Delivering right, on time with good quality did not seem to suffice as right measures to complement the progress towards the transformation.  How can we quantify the overall engagement maturing over time and how, we as a strategic partner were delivering business value consistently?

In today’s world, value is perceived and is also the ability to have a foresight.  This made us foray into measuring the unobvious.   What are the dimensions that value to customer hinges on?  What are the ground behaviours and levers that can be impacted to drive this value?  Can we consolidate these into an index?   GQM helped us narrow down to measure those unobvious.  Here are the key questions that helped unearth the unobvious.

• Are we delivering faster to end user? The standard velocity metric provides how fast I close. The unobvious is how fast the user gets it.   Flip the problem
• How much technological waste does my development generate? Knowing and creating visibility of the unobvious waste helps it getting removed
• Am I preparing for the future? To be specific, how much of my work is spent on AI and Blockchain blueprints in our applications?
• How transparent is my process? How do I indicate where I am and how much lag?
• People are the cornerstone. How is my overall skill index moving? Does this visibility assure in spurring the transformation to come?
• How well am I aligned to customer stake holders? What are the points of friction?

These questions led to some 40% of metrics being new that helped collectively indicate the progress towards transformation. Today, the customer can see where we stand, what we deliver and what’s coming and what are the impediments. These gave the platform to show how we are turning the tides and transforming customer business.

It was the time of Ganapati festival, entire office looked bright & colourful. Around 2 pm in the afternoon the commercial executive had just returned from lunch. He refreshed his email, there were six new messages and one caught his immediate attention. He looked disturbed and also saw a waving hand from his boss out of concern, the recently joined Head of Commercial and Logistics.

The email was from Director General of Foreign Trade of India.

“This is surprising, a duty liability of XX Lacs on 10 Advance licenses? This is quite a lot, what made this happen. I see it hitting our Budget.” exclaimed the boss with sheer concern.

“Sir, I am so sorry. There are more than 100 Licenses to manage and delivery site fell short of exports in these 10.” Executive replied in a nervous tone.

*For Piramal to prevent Duty payments on their Raw Material imports, an export of proportional quantity of finished goods was required. It was managed through Advance Licenses. Executive was responsible to manage this and prevent duty payments. If the exports fall short, a duty liability would be incurred. *

“We can’t let this happen again, Sites must get an intimation well in advance. There has to be a better way to manage it”. The Commercial head looked well determined to arrest the situation. The overall Duty Payments for past 5 years was quite high at around 6% of the total duty forgone, however the target was to keep it much below 1% considering the in-built wastage involved in the manufacturing process.

“Let us engage with our Process improvement team” added the Head Commercial.

The Operational Excellence (OE) team conducted the study of entire process from Lean perspective. Lot of Manual activities, duplications/NVAs were identified, which could be automated.

ECRS approach was deployed to generate ideas.

“Can we build a rock-solid tool which can give live status of all the licenses as and when there is an export or import? It should track & compare all Licenses and possible future liability. No, duplicate entries, no manual calculations!” Quoted the commercial Head. Expectations were set so high!

The task was challenging.

“We can try and develop a Macro Enabled program, it can automate transactions, do dynamic calculations and tracking.” suggested the Operational Excellence person. He had some background in coding but this was an interesting & complex challenge before him.

Days were passing and the lines of Code were increasing along with the expectations.

Almost after 3.5 months of designing, testing and feedback, there were only few pieces left to tackle. The question on how to crack them, had overly occupied OE member’s mind. He had to go into some thorough research for this.

Ultimately after one week, the OE member met with them and asked the executive to try it now.

“Woah!! Amazing”. The executive jumped with joy. “This feels like magic. Only one click and we can see everything!”

“Fantastic! We finally did it.” Commercial Head expressed cheerfully.

The executive’s monthly handling time was reduced by 85%. The duty payments were sustained below 1%, pertaining to a saving impact of 275 Lacs for the year.

The success story didn’t stop here, the project also became the Global Winner of prestigious Chairman’s Award in Service effectiveness category, with an enticing cash prize!

After all it was an innovative tool for the industry, easily replicable as well as self-sustainable.

The hints about the ancient belief of reincarnation that are scattered throughout Hindu mythology often seem to be insignificant to the casual reader. However, for someone who has been at the helm of an organizational paradigm shift, the concept of reincarnation seems very real and substantial.  

Being a famous steel company, we work with a large number of vendors.With over 19 locations around the country, our company works with more than 30,000 vendors. The corporate playing field that our organization represents isakin to the battlefield of Maya that the Hindu scriptures refer to the material world as. Whenever a vendor wanted to collect his due payment from us, he would first have to reach one of our steel plants, submit an inquiry at the vendor desk of the plant and wait for the finance team to revert back with the update. Communication was solely based on word of mouth messages and there was no way in which a vendor could track the progress of his payments.  

This process of payment collection can be parasitic for an organization, especially when there are 6 lac invoices to be processed each year and about INR 50 crores traveling between hands on a daily basis. In this case, without a proper system to track invoices, as well as a lack of unique tracking ID for vendors, the management of payments was extremely difficult. Our plants, where truckloads of raw material were a common sight, now became a hub for “truckloads” of angry and confused phone calls and emails.  

In Hindu mythology, karma is the word that denotes the sum total of all the actions that a soul has performed during its time in the physical world. Depending on the actions that you do in this world, your next life will be determined, as a natural consequence for the decisions you make. Our karma in this case, was what one could call “bad karma”. For us, the future did not look so bright and any sort of organizational progress in its true sense seemed out of reach.  

This is when we understood that we would need to look for a solution outside the boundaries of the ordinary. Instead of focusing on developing our on-field operations, we decided to transcend the material world and use the powers of the digital realm to solve our issues. By building a digital platform for our vendors, we were able to provide them a customized and extremely intuitive interface which could be used to check invoice status at each stage of the process.In an attempt to reduce the number of calls and inquiries that we were receiving, the digital portal was equipped with call recording and monitoring systems. The portal also allowed us to implement a ticketing tool that would help vendors maintain a track of their queries and the responses that they get. The digital platform also allowed us to strengthen our internal follow-up system, allowing us to include crucial stakeholders as liaisonswithin the process.  

In the end, with a 22.9% decrease in monthly vendor queries, we had just escaped the unending cycle of death and rebirth that most companies experience, consistently having to face the same issues due to a lack of innovative solutions.  

“Means justifies the end” in Digital Transformation Overcoming the ‘Achilles heel’ of Digital Transformation The CEO had flown down from US to Bangalore and was reviewing various initiatives of the organization. The office was buzzing with activities all around. He was walking the floor, meeting people, sharing his views and listening from them. Over years he had been aggressively driving the vision of digital transformation. 2017 was a year of change for many reasons. Spending capacitiesacross customers were changing with the impact of digital. There was gloom across traditional IT sector in India with many retrenched across organizations. During the visit, he was discussing with the CIO on the digital transformation of Brillians. CIOpresented the OnTheGO digital app, its features, its ease of use and highlighted how the app has a “soul” that they brought lifestyle thinking into a corporate app. Seldom he expected the sharp questions that made him uncomfortable “How many as a % of employees use it?”, “How much impact has it brought?” Thud came the command, “If you cannot commit an impact, stop the initiative”. However, shortly after this event, the CEO unveiled his commitment to the digital program as part of his goal sheet “five key processes have to be mobile first”. What went without saying is that the app must be a delight to use and this should be our testimony of creating delightful moments to our customers. Also, digital solution should be of “Apple” quality – intelligent, easy to use and reliable. This demanded one key shift – “Master few and not be jack of many” i.e., take few features and go deeper to see that 100% would delightfully adopt. Two aspects stood out as we researched what’s out there. First, there should either exist a crying need or we should be able to create a demand. Team came up with ideas to create a demand by integrating with other systems and made this the only channel. Second, new product must break real world barriers to create “moments of delight” and habitual usage. Team designed the app with intelligence to create moments of delight. App fills the weekly time for the employee based on projects involved and leaves/holiday availed during the week. If a person doesn’t come to office, app auto-fills the leave information and presents to the employee. All basic organizational activities are fueled by intelligence to be completed in less than 10 seconds compared to 15 minutesfor web. Also, the app socially integrates users in nudging employees to celebrate birthdays and work anniversaries of colleagues. Adoption of the app has been tremendous, and it has won many external awards. Today OnTheGO has become a testimony for Brillio, a delight for Brillians, a brand in the market place, a pride of Brillio’s Systems team. Takeaway 1. Digital transformation is about adoption and impact, not about the idea 2. For long lasting change, theremust be a crying need or must instill a need 3. For deeper impact, break real world barriers and create moments of delight 4. Executing with vision in mind is important