SKS Microfinance had certain unique requirements that demanded the deployment
of a Business Intelligence backbone, which was agile, but flexible and
upgrade-friendly. Most transactions that SKS handles are remote transactions
that happen across its 2000 branches spread across the country. The first
obvious requirement was a centralized dashboard which could monitor each of
these transactions at a very deep level — by location, by branch, by nature of
transaction, by vendor, etc — and a mechanism to identify irregularities.
Scenario before BI
Before this deployment, transactions were logged into Excel sheets and the
head office had to collate and analyze them. This required skilled manpower, and
often, knowledge of specific analytical tools and operations. In order to
increase efficiency and speed up the data transfer across branch offices, and
also to determine if the business was moving in the direction of projected
business growth, SKS Microfinance decided on having a personalized Business
Intelligence framework.
Main concern
The requirements — or rather challenges — that the BI framework had to
solve, was defined primarily as Data Consolidation. Data had to be pushed into a
central repository, transaction status checks had to be made possible — of cash
collected, deposited, in transit — and the system needed to have an
'intelligent' mechanism to compare and contrast with goals set. SKS partnered
with Wipro who custom-made this solution.
SKS Microfinance claims that the Return on Investment of the BI framework has
been reached in a period of 6 months itself. But interestingly, a new problem
has cropped up.
We started seeing ROI in the second month itself, in terms of better cash management Pradeep Kalra, CIO, SKS Microfinance |
What are some of the unique challenges in the
Microfinance is a game of numbers — extremely precise What has been the single biggest benefit of the When do you expect to realize the Return on Could you elaborate on the plans for rural areas? Do you have future plans for this BI project? |
Remote connectivity issues
Some of the company's 5000 odd branch offices are located in remote areas
where availability of power is around 6-7 hours in a day. The unique business of
a microfinance company demands that data cannot wait for long hours before
getting recorded. SKS estimates that 5-10% of operational efficiency directly
translating to profits is affected by this single reason of power shortages.
Future roadmap
To solve this problem, SKS has in its roadmap, a plan to simplify data
uploads, by employees located at these remote areas. This would translate to
using mobile or smart phones to input transaction data.
Incidentally, this would also eliminate the need for trained personnel at
remote locations. Hence, in the next stage of the BI deployment, SKS hopes to
further increase the frequency of data uploads and a more agile and active
central repository.