HDFC Standard Life Insurance : Consultant Corner

HDFC Standard Life needed to empower their Financial Consultants by providing
them with information with respect to their customers, proposals, leads,
incentives, rewards, etc and ensure that the Senior management too has access to
all relevant sales data to monitor the sales process effectively.

While the Core Policy Management System that hosts the organization's data
assets provided senior management with access to business critical data, the
confidential nature of such data made it difficult for this information to be
shared with sales staff to provide them information on policy reminders, status
of proposals etc.

An initiative was thus begun in early 2003 to provide field staff with an
Internet based service through which they could access relevant information
without accessing the core policy management system. The relevant data was
pulled from the Core Policy System and displayed to users as per the role and
hierarchy within the organization. With the successful

implementation of the first requirement, came newer needs that were subsequently
fulfilled, thus resulting in the Consultant Corner.

Consultant Corner' is an Internet-based application that empowers multiple
business segments (Sales Base, Employee Base, Operations Team, Middle and Senior
Management, Accounts etc) of HDFC Standard Life with timely and accurate
repository of information and functionalities that helps improve efficiency and
reduce costs.

Project Benefits

The application has helped HDFCSL to streamline and optimize the sales
operation. It provides for centralized control over a vast geographical spread
for key business units such as Inventory, Training, Licensing, etc. It drives
greater productivity and cost savings as it transforms and streamlines processes
that interlink various business groups within the org (B2B) as well as third
party vendors (B2E). The scalable architecture of the application ensures that
new modules, functionalities, etc can be added onto the system as per Business
needs.

He is an MBA (1988) and BS, Computer Science (1986) from Kent State University, USA. While his professional interests include Business Transformation, Technology Value Systems and Organisational Behaviour, he is fond of Photography and Music on the personal front. He has 22 years of total work-ex with many leading companies. Sunil Rawlani, CIO Q What were the challenges and business problems that led to implement this project? To empower our Financial Consultants — we need to provide them with up to date information with respect to their customers, proposals, leads, incentives, rewards, etc and ensure that the Senior management too has access to all relevant sales data to monitor the sales process effectively. Q What is the USP of this Projexc? Consultant Corner' is an Internet Based Application that empowers multiple business segments (Sales Base, Employee Base, Operations Team, Middle and Senior Management, Accounts etc) of HDFC Standard Life with timely and accurate repository of information and functionalities that helps improve efficiency and reduce costs. The application provides for centralized control over a vast geographical spread for key business units such as Inventory, Training, Licensing etc. Application drives greater productivity and cost savings as it transforms and streamlines processes that interlink various business groups within the org (B2B) as well as third party vendors (B2E).

Hierarchy based reporting provides end users with the facility to drill down
to the lowest level of sales hierarchy in a matter of clicks. Information pools
of data are thus collated and displayed to key users.

The implementation of this system has resulted in an overhaul of the
associated administrative process. Field Staff have access to their RNEP
information for specific periods with complete transparency, allowing them to
evaluate all policies that have contributed to the RNEP for a specific period.
With the deployment of this module, productivity of the members of the team
members has increased by 50%, since queries and calls concerning RNEP have been
drastically reduced.

Accuracy and validity of data being shared is subject to audit by the field
staff who are directly impacted by the same. Field Staff are driven by the
actual numbers they see on the system that allows them to assess their current
position, position where they can go to and to plan their business accordingly.
This data is also used to decide incentives that the staff is due to receive as
well as appraisals.

The reporting tool allows multi-dimensional collation of data/graphs in a
matter of clicks. The excel based user interface provides the user with the
flexibility to then slice and dice the information as per the requirements.

A Financial consultant always carries a diary to keep track of various
things. Consultant Corner is a virtual diary for them. After the deployment
there has been reduction in operating cost by 15 per cent. Uniform sales
monitoring is possible across the organization.

There are direct benefits in terms of EPI, Persistency and FC recruitment. It
is now possible to make sales team aware of their performance through timely
availability of information.

Implementation Partners

There were many implementation partners involved in the implementation of
Consultant's Corner. Sify provided the hosting, ACL Wireless was responsible for
providing the SMS services being used by the portal, CORE Security provided
application penetration testing and vulnerability assessment. Synaptris provided
the Intelliview reporting tool that's being used for MIS, and finally Wipro did
the RAC implementation and is also currently handling the storage device
maintenance.

The Future

There are many other things planned for the future of this project. These
include integration with the IVR system, compatibility with PDAs and other hand
held devices, smart client and offline application support, user configurable
web pages, and addition of Web 2.0 technologies like Mash-ups and composite
applications.