Contentverse in EXIM Bank results in efficient document management practices and automated workflow processes
About EXIM Bank
India’s Premier Export Import Finance Institution, EXIM BANK has its headquarters in Mumbai with Branch Offices across many locations in India. EXIM functions as the principal financial institution for coordinating the working of institutions engaged in financing export and import of goods and services with a view to promote the country’s international trade.
Business Requirement
Export-Import Bank of India invited proposals for Designing and Implementing a Document Management System (DMS) solution, mainly keeping in mind their Legal Department.
The system was proposed to be implemented initially at Bank’s Legal Group and thereafter extended to other functional areas of the Bank and other offices in different geographical areas across the country.
Legal Group
Legal Group prepares and approves all the documents necessary for execution of loans to various customers. It acts as a support unit for Operating Groups, maintaining loan-wise documents and scheme-wise templates and interfacing with Operating Groups at each phase. The documents, in safe custody, are returned to Operating Groups after the loan expiry. The Group also handles legal issues that require to be addressed while operating cycle related to loan approval, monitoring and administration.
The loan information flows broadly as under:
- Correspondence with customer
- Application
- Evaluation of Loan and Sanction
- Loan documentation
- Creation of security and related documentation
- Disbursement, repayments and monitoring
- Redemption of loan and release of documents
Need for Document Management Solution
The Legal group wanted to access information based on full text search or defined parameters such as Company Name, Various documents executed by the company, Loan Agreement or Programme / Group
Besides, the Group wanted to put the opinions and judgements obtained into a knowledge management database for querying purposes. These and other queries should equip the Legal Group to facilitate quicker decisions and extend the potential benefits across the Bank, especially to the Operating Groups.
Apart from their genuine requirement for DMS, they also required Workflow capabilities within the DMS solution. The Workflow requirement was for Legal Group to automate their Inward-Outward Process.
All these points were clearly mentioned in their RFP. Contentverse (formerly ViewWise) submitted its Technical and Financial Bid. Contentverse won the tender and bagged the order for DMS and Workflow amidst stiff competition from other bidders.
The Project
Contentverse (ViewWise) was implemented in the Legal Department after a detailed System and Document study along with Workflow. Also, the Inward/Outward workflow Process was automated wherein Draft Documents regarding Loan Information are sent from Operating Groups/Regional Offices. The Group Head assigns personnel to work on these Draft Documents. After draft documents are reviewed, modified & finally Verified, the approved documents are sent back to the Operating Group, which is called as Outward. Upon completion of the process, the final document is stored in specific folders.
Expansion of Usage
Over time, witnessing the benefits the legal department derived, other departments also started to use Contentverse for their needs. TAG (Treasury and Accounts Group) scanned their physical vouchers and other supporting documents so that their physical documents could be shifted to their storage capacity in Pune. Scanning services were also offered and fulfilled by the team of Contentverse and its partners.
Lines of Credit (LOC) and HR departments also scanned their backlog documents and utilized our services. As HR documents are highly confidential, a need for a separate DB Schema user and a separate administrator was to be created and the same was achieved within Contentverse.
Exim Bank progressively extended the usage of DMS to their Regional offices and planned to change their approach wherein RO users would directly upload documents in Legal Safe custody. In 2015, they expanded the Contentverse system and added more licenses to meet their needs.
This change in approach of uploading and storing documents in Legal department resulted in designing a workflow wherein Operating Groups users from RO’s would directly upload documents. Exim had also implemented Infosys’s Finnacle for its operations and as part of the workflow within Contentverse, information related to Sanction/Loan was fetched from Finnacle by using the DB-lookup feature available within Contentverse.
The criteria for the workflow was based on Regional Office selected by the initiator so that the document would be assigned to the concerned Administrative officer of that RO.
Creation of folders/sub folder within Contentverse based on rules and limits of the loan provided were now fully automated.
It is noteworthy to mention that satisfied users referred using Contentverse to other departments within Exim Bank and initiated measures to expand the usage across the Bank.
Factors for Contentverse ROI
EXIM Bank achieved a near instant ROI in the following areas:
- Efficiency in document creation, storage, and distribution
- Enhanced security of documents over physical storage
- Increased productivity when searching for documents
- Process and Workflow Automation
- Cost benefit through electronic distribution
Based on their overall satisfaction, EXIM has recommended Contentverse to other customers and continues to be a valuable reference point and provides feedback to others who are evaluating/intend to use Contentverse.