In 
Suresh Shanmugam, HeadBITS, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services (MMFSL), should have been a contented man with the robust growth that his company was able to post on a year-on-year basis.
Yet, even as hundreds of company agents from its around 500 branches went about the country financing loans and collecting payments, Shanmugam was constantly thinking of ways and means to automate or technolise the whole process.
Could there be a mechanism by which collections by agents instantly reflected in the central database? Also, could the central server send alerts to customers confirming that their payments had been received? MMFSL needed all these, and much more, but at an affordable cost.
Getting started
Prior to deciding on a solution that would work best for the company, Shanmugam asked his team to map the users of the company on the basis of their roles and requirements. An in-depth study was also done to access how the agents interacted with customers, and what were the specifications of the transactions that were carried out.
Based on the study findings, the team put together specifications that would best suit the organisations growth plans. Also, since the aim was to reduce cost and increase productivity, it was decided that open source would be used to achieve the objective.
Exceptions were also defined. For example, it was decided that those constituting top 10% of the management would be provided any system they required, based on their needs, closed or proprietary.
The next 20% (in terms of hierarchy) were also to be provided with solutions that suited them. However, it was decided to encourage them to use open solution, Shanmugam informed. For the remaining 70%, the decision was clear: the workforce would be moved on to the open source systems in a phased manner.
The solution
To automate the business processes, the team set about searching for a handheld device that would enable the company run the necessary business solution. The proposed solution aimed at establishing a seamless linkage between the companys customers and a centralised database.
After much deliberation and search, and close to 22 failed attempts, Shanmugam and his team were finally able to identify one of the smaller hardware vendors to design a solution that mapped with the MMFSL needs. And thus MFConnect was born, a handheld that supported automating the processes.
The company decided to take up a new area not automated so far. Along with the partners, MMFSL went in for the development of software for recording the happenings in the field instantly through handheld devices. Three specific areas were chosenreceipt generation, customer commitment recording and capturing of data pertaining to the visit.
Over a period of time, close to 3,000 such devices were introduced within the company with remarkable success. Based on the feedback from the use of MFConnect, in 2008-09, MMFSL went for the next generation of handheld devices, dubbed as BizConnect.
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