Stacked files, thousand operations, multiple systems and a million reports. Imagine sitting in the corner office with these ‘essentials’, running an eye through every single word of every report generated by every possible department in your organization. Sounds like a mammoth exercise? It is.
Nobody wants to be at the receiving end of such a deluge.
But, N. Gajapathy, CIO, Transworks Information Services, Asia, found himself in one.
A wholly owned subsidiary of Aditya Birla Nuvo (erstwhile Indian Rayon), Transworks provides various CRM services like inbound customer services, technical support, e-mail and Web-based chat support, outbound telemarketing, and non-CRM KPO services like integrated marketing services, data and transaction processing, among others.
The company has operations that span 33 global facilities, including offices in Canada, Germany, Hungary, India, Philippines, U.K. and U.S., delivering services to Global 1000 automotive, financial services, technology and telecom companies.
Cooks and the Broth
Considering its size and range of its many operations the need for setting up numerous systems was more than just apparent.
“Transworks deployed multiple systems for its key operations such as recording, dialing, quality scoring, training evaluation and so on,” recalls Gajapathy. “However, each system had its own reporting mechanism, and the senior executive team had to access multiple dashboards to get these reports. Consequently, cross-functional analysis was non-existent. The senior management found the process cumbersome, and weren’t sure of the reliability and accuracy of these reports.”
At that time, Transworks was running a mix of applications on a range of platforms. Consequently, there was no integration and no way of tying all the pieces together in order to provide meaningful and timely analysis to the top management.
Matters were complicated by the scope of activities involved and naturally, the data generated pertaining to these activities was large.
“We realized the need to help ourselves find ways of extracting data out of legacy systems, and turning the information into actionable data for decision-makers,” says Gajapathy.
Cube in the Cubicle
To overcome these challenges, Gajapathy realized that Transworks had to integrate data from all these systems. And the best way, he felt, was to create a portal that would provide all the reports required by top management on a single platform. And that platform was to be called ‘Cube.’
While architecting the portal, Gajapathy wanted to ensure that the solution provided superior performance and for this reason, he chose Windows 2003 64 bit OS. Since top management wanted a greater level of accessibility, he used a Web-based front end with integrated security. The database functionality was provided by an ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) tool developed using SQL Server 2005.
Gajapathy says that Cube allows data presentation based on various parameters, like business verticals, business channels, and contact type across multiple sites. The ETL tool can also connect to heterogeneous data sources from various business units, and Cube also possesses the ability to drill down on all reports up to the transaction record level.
The core of Cube lay in its capacity to analyze data. Therefore, each transaction record was stored to provide deeper analysis, points out Gajapathy.
Senior management can now view all the reports from a single location and also filter reports based on their requirements just by having the Cube in the comfort of their cubicles.
Solving the Puzzle
The data generated by Cube can get complex as it has to deal with information from various sources. Hence, it was suitably designed to possesses the ability to display animated flash graphs that represent multiple dimensions and also allows ‘slicing’ of data in fine layers. This made data easily readable and also helped in faster decision making. “Cube even provides trends analysis of agents across multiple sites, verticals and hierarchies,” says Gajapathy.
Transworks also built .Net-based graphical interfaces that gave it a more professional look, and added a graphical dashboard for the reports. “Managers can now view reports in the form of speedometers, pie-charts, 3-dimensional or N-dimensional tables and charts,” says Gajapathy.
But the biggest advantage of Cube has been the acceptance by the senior management. Gajapathy says, “Earlier, senior management never used to access reports because it was quite cumbersome. This flexibility has ensured application scalability, enabling our organization to scale up to meet new requirements as growth demands.”
Some of this usability has come from the fact that the Cube automates reports that earlier had to be generated manually. Giving an example, Gajapathy says, “For instance, let’s assume that the marketing team wants to run a campaign-wise analysis. Earlier, this had to be done manually, but with the new reporting application, the details of each campaign are converted into percentages so that comparisons across campaigns are easily possible. Now, especially for outbound campaigns, senior management can visually analyze patterns to determine whether a particular time of a day or a week leads to better results.”
Thanks to this, these reports improve decision-making and even allow for mid-stream campaign corrections.
Going Forward
While Cube has strategic importance, it also plays a role in operations. For instance, divisions are also able to get cross-functional reports. For example, for operational purposes, training and agent performance can be easily correlated. The agent’s performances can be categorized into different scales and the progress made by individual agents can be tracked.
“Cube has been independently developed, designed and implemented by a team of subject matter experts, who understand the dynamics of this segment completely,” says Gajapathy.
Thanks to the positive results, Gajapathy is keen on taking Cube forward aggressively. “The first version went live in 2006. We have been appreciated by several customers, and the results have been tremendous. Since the executive team has been able to take several decisions based on the results of this innovation, we have decided that the scope should be expanded. Cube now includes all our sites in other geographies, encompassing seven countries.”
Transwork’s future plans also include adding performance prediction and data mining capabilities into Cube. Already, Cube is linked across all sites of Transworks in India, and sustains processing speeds of 15 lakh transactions per second.
Processing speeds apart, Gajapathy is pleased with the paradigm shift that Cube has brought about in his organization.
Earlier, the company spent 90 percent of its time gathering data, and 10 percent making decisions. “Now, we use 10 percent of the time to gather information, and spend 90 percent time in making decisions,” he states. He is also quick to point out that the solution has been achievable and cost-effective.
The extra time for decision-making, feels Gajapathy, has also improved his company’s competitiveness. “Cube has actionable dashboards that are highly interactive and also help in seeing the impact of previous decisions, and forecasting how they will impact us in the future. This sort of comprehensive analysis allows us to respond quickly to change with effective decisions, and sharpens our competitiveness considerably.”
In addition to the above features, since Cube also stores all transactions, it enables the company to get a full understanding of the history of all operations and changes, thereby reducing compliance risk and lowering the cost of maintenance and auditing. Gajapathy says, “We can use Cube for just about anything. Management reports, audit summaries, financial statements, productivity results, analysis of various processes and more can all be functionally and visually enhanced.” And this is not an idle boast — the Cube has been used for everything from monitoring server uptime to cafeteria feedback.
Gajapathy feels that since Cube has improved the completeness, accuracy, and quality of his organization’s data, the next step forward is to move from business intelligence to predictive analytics.
Transworks has disengaged itself from the vicious circle of a complicated monitoring system to the simpler and defined Cube. The cubicle now, is not that bad a place to be in.
Balaji Narasimhan is assistant editor.
