The Confluence of Work Optimization and Case Management: Q&A With Gal Horvitz
by Patricia Ames | 6/21/16
Gal Horvitz is the founder and CEO of PNMsoft, a multinational company with headquarters in the UK. PNMsoft provides BPM software solutions to businesses and organizations worldwide and is the leading Microsoft-based vendor for intelligent BPM solutions. The company is known for its intelligent business process management suite called Sequence, but they have recently added HotOperations, a case management and work optimization tool that enables operations managers to optimize work allocation in real time. I spoke with Gal to learn more about the development of their new tool and how the intelligent operational capabilities can help organizations reduce costs and improve service.
How does your work optimization and case management suite work?
Managing a large operations center comes with unique challenges. HotOperations enables operations managers to optimize work allocation in real time, and this helps save costs and increase profit. For example, in an operations center, large volumes of cases must be allocated to different departments. Our tool assigns cases automatically to the right team using intelligent allocation rules. Managers can see each department’s work queue and simply drag and drop incoming cases, assign them to each department, and move cases between departments.
How does this help with workflow?
Managers know instantly what impact each assignment will have on the overall cost and SLA with real-time predictive analytics. This results in a much more direct understanding and control of workflow. The system also recommends which assignments to make to maximize the outcome, taking into account each department and team’s skill level, work schedule, cost of work, and performance.
What makes HotOperations different than its competitors?
There are many case management and work optimization solutions available, but our new tool is the first software to combine these two capabilities into one integrated suite. You could theoretically buy two different solutions separately, but they would not work together with the same agility and interoperability. The synergy means that each case can be handled optimally and high volumes of cases can be allocated between teams and users, maximizing business outcomes. The reason that work optimization works so well is that the system retrieves data from each case to decide who is best qualified to handle that case.
What unique challenges does your solution solve?
The great challenge of managing an operation successfully is in allocating work to teams in an optimal way. The right allocation is essential in reducing the average cost and time spent on each case, improving the quality of work, and meeting SLAs. But it’s not simple to allocate work according to changing real-time conditions to achieve such optimization, and that’s where our new suite comes in. Real-time allocation, along with information on the impact of each allocation, helps operations managers decide where to allocate each piece of work.
Can you give us an example of organizations that are using HotOperations? How is it working for them?
It’s a new product, but already several of our customers are using our case management and work optimization capabilities. One is a bank that uses the tool to facilitate the remediation of a population of over 5,000 entities. Financial analysts manage cases, view case data and perform ad hoc workflows. This has resulted in better management of a large volume of cases, 35 percent reduction in administration costs, and 40 percent better accuracy on a case-per-case basis. Another example is a leading IT systems provider that is using the suite to create a case management portal that provides a view of all cases in the system as well as metadata, analytics and sub-workflows that can be performed on each case; all within SharePoint. This has enabled their analysts to save on average of 25 hours per month and better concentrate on improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
How can companies calculate the ROI when utilizing your tool?
We wanted to make it easy to calculate, so we have created an ROI calculator that can be found on our website. It factors in elements such as size of operation, tasks/cases per day, average cost of work and frequency of changes in team composition.
Find out more at pnmsoft.com.
Patricia Ames is senior analyst for BPO Media, which publishes The Imaging Channel and Workflow magazines. As a market analyst and industry consultant, Ames has worked for prominent consulting firms including KPMG and has more than 10 years experience in the imaging industry covering technology and business sectors. Ames has lived and worked in the United States, Southeast Asia and Europe and enjoys being a part of a global industry and community. Follow her on Twitter at @OTGPublisher or contact her by email at patricia@bpomedia.com
is president and senior analyst for BPO Media, which publishes The Imaging Channel and Workflow magazines. As a market analyst and industry consultant, Ames has worked for prominent consulting firms including KPMG and has more than 15 years experience in the imaging industry covering technology and business sectors. Ames has lived and worked in the United States, Southeast Asia and Europe and enjoys being a part of a global industry and community.
