An article by Steffen Lorenz, Principal Consultant, Software AG and Rainer Schnell, Head of Business Development, Syracom AG
In classical business process management (BPM) the focus lies primarily on the optimization of business processes that re-occur frequently with the same structure, for instance in payment, securities, and credit transactions. However, there are areas in which business transactions do not always follow the same process, such as when processing inquiries or customer complaints, opening accounts, or for exceptional payment transactions. Case workers must react flexibly to individual business transactions and chose a fitting processing method for the respective case. These kinds of processes are a great cost driver and are of critical significance to customer service. So-called case management takes a central role in the optimization of these processes.
Definition: Case management is an integrated approach to the organization and processing of business transactions (cases) that have similar triggers, similar structures, and common (identical) properties even though they are different in terms of content. A case management system supports case management by summarizing one or more business processes, documents, and data from different systems into one case and automatically forwarding it to the responsible employee for processing. Since a business transaction may be processed by different organizational units over a longer period of time, the case management system also takes on the classification, delegation and/or escalation of the cases and monitors the processing deadlines.
When introducing case management it is especially important to integrate all systems needed to prepare the necessary data for the case on an institute-specific basis and to organize the integration of the different organizational units for the finalization of the cases. This means that, in addition to integrating the different channels that trigger the case (e.g. e-mail, fax, letter, or SWIFT message), the inventory or contract management systems of the bank must be integrated in order to make it possible to process the case without repeatedly collecting the same data. We offer various processes for processing the cases. These individual adjustments can be minimized if the case management system is based on high-performance BPM systems and integration tools.
PINQ is a case management system of Syracom AG based on technologies of the Software AG that already offers essential functionalities and processes for case management ready-to-use. The (sub-)processes are adjusted in graphical models that can be executed immediately. The bank systems are integrated via standard adapters. Numerous banks already use PINQ for payment transactions, which lead to savings of about 50%.
With case management based on PINQ, financial services providers are in a position to create a central platform that allows them to process complex business transactions efficiently and effectively. As a central platform, PINQ can be used to bundle diverse application cases and provide a basis for the successive summarization of cost-intensive and time and quality critical internal and external processes.