 A very good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the exchange for media CIO dialogues on digital customer servicing experience. Formative digitalization hosted by Adobe and Argil DX. The core of digital servicing today is digitalization. By increasing productivity and efficiency while reducing costs, digitalization focuses on creating cash by saving it and creating a significant impact in the digital transformation roadmap of an organization and most importantly on a CIO's KPIs. Formative digitalization is an exclusive CIO-led session that will take you through formative and advanced steps in modernizing the digital customer servicing experience from within the organization. It focuses on harnessing the power of data and intelligent workflows to further streamline operations across the entire institution, leading to reduce errors, save time, optimizing costs and most importantly better cost acquisition and after sales customer satisfaction. But before we jump straight into the discussion, we'd like to play an AB which will give you an insight into exactly how well can digitalization help you to get out of tricky situations. Can you please have the AB? Everybody on the floor! This is a robbery! Get down! Get down! Get down and stay down! You move! The money! The money! Open the phone! Mr. Johnson? Eric? Johnson? How did she know your name? I don't know. Your mobile app pinged us when you walked in. Looks like you were on our website and thinking about buying a house. Moving out, man? I need my space. You may think you can't afford a new home but we have some amazing new rates. I could text them to you. Oh, that's fantastic. And Mr. Davis? Yeah, it's me. Did you click on one of our emails about consolidating your student loans? Maybe. Oh, well, we can help you with that too. Hey, hey, hey! What are you doing? This is a robbery! Remember? Can I lock those rates in on the app? Well, of course you can sugar. And to kick start the discussion, I would like to now invite Mr. Vaishak Bhenugopalan, Head of Solutions Consulting, Adobe India. Hi, Vaishak. Hello, Neeta. Hi, and we also have Uncle Mital, MD and co-founder of Arjun DX. Hi, Uncle and over to you. Hi, Neeta. Hi, thanks for inviting me into the panel, Neeta. And how are you doing, Vaishak? Doing great, Uncle. Let's kick start this great discussion. All right, all right. So we have some great panel lined up today with us. We have Ashish Gupta, an alumnus of prestigious IIT, Delhi. Ashish Gupta has done various hard centers, long tech inning, which has been a mix of entrepreneurship and serving in senior leadership roles with the brands like ICI Paint, StudyPlaces.com, PolicyBazaar. He's currently serving as CTO at leading insurance brand, Max Gupta Health Insurance. Welcome, Ashish, to the panel. Hey, thank you so much, Uncle. And thanks for making me feel so old. How are you doing today, Ashish? Very well. Thank you. All right. Who else do we have, Vaishak? And it's my privilege and pleasure to introduce V. Mazumdar with he has an acumen for technology and business insight. He's the global chief digital and information officer at Pyramil Glass, and he has successfully led multi-country IIT deployments and change management programs. He has enabled business transformation in not only in India, but in Europe as well for large global organization with very strong execution skill, bringing in a lot of innovation and people orientation. One interesting thing, Sudheer was also a TEDx speaker, and he shares his expertise in creating future leaders. My pleasure and privilege to invite you to the panel today. Sudheer, welcome. Thanks so much. Thank you guys for inviting me here. And it's a really a privilege to be here. And if I can share some of the, you know, some of my experience and I'll be really privileged. Thank you very much. Look forward to that. Uncle, over to you for our next panelist. So we have Dr. Udes Sawant. Welcome, Dr. Udes Sawant. He in a carrier spending over three decades with a proven track record in managing large transformation programs in mostly all the verticals, be it government, public sector, enterprises, everywhere. He has served varied customer segments in Fortune 500 companies and has led, you know, and mentored multicultural and cross-functional teams to ensure successful delivery of digital programs globally. Dr. Udes Sawant has constantly strived to bridge technology and strategic objectives to provide a transformational business solution. And he's also part of the one digital leadership team and LTI, Larson and Tobro Infotech, and currently heads the digital experience practice comprising of 1000 plus team members. Welcome, Dr. Udes Sawant. Yes. Hello, everyone. Thank you. And thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be part of this discussion. And I hope you have a very interesting conversation today. Thank you. Looking forward. So we are going to kind of break the, you know, this panel discussion from the monotonous way. We are having Veshak to play a very important role today. Veshak is actually going to bring in the audience into the panel discussion, which we typically don't do. So he's going to, you know, do some polling and some questions and will bring in the people's opinion in the panel discussion as well so that it's a well-engaged discussion. And we are just not talking among the five of us. So Veshak is going to do that. Veshak, you want to quickly brief how you are going to bring our audience view into the panel discussion today? Exactly. So our audience is today part of the discussion. So stay tuned. We'll have you ask questions to our esteemed panel and also see what you think and feel about the topics that we are discussing today, right? It is super simple to participate. I'm just pasting a link into the chat board and you can also see that this is how you can actually participate. It's pretty easy. You can go to your, from your mobile phone, you can go to menti.com as you can see on top. Type in this code, which is 54927103 and you can start engaging in this live session today on your mobile phone or on your browser. That's in there. Once you have logged in, keep that tab open because we will be presenting more questions to you and opportunities for you to ask questions to this panel member and say, have your say as well. So keep that tab open and we rest assured as one of the moderator, I will bring in the audience perspective to the panel discussion today so that it's going to get really interesting. Panel sharing questions from both the moderator and the audiences today. So there we have as an icebreaker, I have the first question. I understand that a lot of people are bringing their office today, right? So bring your own office and you can see your first question. Let's see how diverse of a group we have today, right? Please go ahead and enter into this particular menti.com enter the code and pin your location and we get to see where all, which all parts of India are participating today in this particular discussion. Back to you uncle. This exercise actually remembered me of my, you know, 5th class days when we used to have the political map and we used to draw the boundaries of the state. So interesting way to start the discussion, Vishak. Thanks for that and people please try to bring in your opinion. We definitely want to put our panelists in the tough spot and throw some curveballs. So we'll have some interesting polls and then we'll also have open kind of questions. So please help Vishak to bring in these questions to the panelists. So I think with that we'll kick off the discussion and we'll I think break the topic first. You know, we'll break the buzzword digitalization versus digital transformation. So I think I'll start with you, Ashish. So in your opinion, what is digitalization versus digital transformation and how does it differ in your organization? Right. So I'll actually maybe answer that with the example that's fairly easy to understand. I'm not very knowledgeable. So I typically refrain from anything very intelligent. So I'll keep it simple. These are three terms that get used very, very often. Digitization, digitalization and automation or transformation interchangeably. And I think often it's a bit confusing as to what they are. My interpretation is as follows. Take a simple process like you used to go to office and you used to fill up that register where you used to mark your attendance, right? Digitization is data being converted digital. So in that context, at the end of the month, probably somebody in HR took that register entered into an Excel sheet. That's digitization. You've taken an offline data made it online. Then came digitalization where when you walked in, maybe there was an EA or you had a punching mechanism where you actually punched your attendance yourself. So no longer did the HR have to do that useless job of punching in that data. That data was digitalized. So a process is digitalized. Data is digitized. That's the distinction between the two in my opinion. And the third one is the transformation or automation. Now, then you had biometrics. And in fact, that's a partial transformation because the user still has to do something. They have to put their thumb print in. And if you replace that with a video attendance mechanism, then that is complete automation. So depending on how you're looking at transformation, I think a biometric is a half transformation or automation and a video one is a full one. So I think that's an example that comes to my mind when I think of these three things, data, process, and then getting the user to be completely hands-free. Great example, Ashish. And I think that actually simplifies these three buzzwords. How do you basically differ that within your organization when it comes to the customer, the customer that you service as part of Max Boopa? How do you basically bring- Oh, so the same principles apply right across, right? We talk of digitization first, right? We used to get all our claims up until last year, 12 months ago. We used to get 90% of our reimbursement claims as a policy document. Like people used to take a printout. They used to courier us the documents. Somebody used to punch in all of that data. Because of COVID and thankfully because of COVID, we didn't have that opportunity. Nobody was willing to courier their documents or go to a courier place. And in fact, the couriers weren't working very well, right? So we digitized everything. Now everything comes to us digitized, right? So no data do we actually punch in everything. The entire process is now what I said, digitalized. The data is automatically digitized. And you'll be surprised to know that we moved from less than 5% digital submission to 94% digital submission in a matter of three months. I mean, nothing great that we did. There was no option. We had to survive it. We had to make those interfaces. But that's how rapidly digitalization happens. And similarly on customer service, I'll give another very, very simple example. What is the most important thing that happens in insurance? Only two things, right? Where is my policy? I bought a policy. I haven't received a soft copy. Or what is the status of my claim? I made a claim. I haven't got my payment yet, right? And you look at the typical process, somebody would email, somebody would look at it and then somebody would punch in a few numbers in the backend in the system, come out with a status, mail the customer back and the customer. That's all nonsense, right? Because the system already knows what the status of the claim or the status of the policy is. So now what we are releasing, I think today, hopefully, is actually the complete automation of that process where if a customer punches in, hey, where is my policy copy? The response comes to you right away. If the response is that, hey, your policy is already issued and they say, I haven't received my policy copy, you'll actually get a WhatsApp email, SMS with the policy copy right away. No human being required, complete automation, better tied for the customer, lower cost for us, everybody. It's a really, really simple but a big win-win. And our hope is by the end of the next about 8 to 10 months, about 70% of our customer requests would all be end-to-end automated, not needing a single human being or not needing more than two seconds to report to the customer. Great point, great point. So in fact, I remember how IRDA somewhere in the time of May actually allowed people to have the digital copies instead of they wanted people to sign the hard copies and they received their insurance. And I think I'll take that question to Dr. Uday Savan because the part of his engagements also deals with a lot of public sector and has been involved in policy and decision-making at the government side. And not just from IRDA perspective, he deals with a lot of different type of customers. So Dr. Uday, how do you basically see digitalization versus digital transformation with the clients you deal with? Yeah, so thank you. And I think the definition is quite clear already, digitization, digitalization and digital transformation. So just to explain it a bit further, the digitalization is again specifically a process, single process. For example, one of our customers, Otis elevators, right? So they have automated a process of filing the time sheet of an elevator repair mechanic. So mechanic goes to the site, opens a mobile lab, services the elevator, enters the information, his location, his time, start time and time, everything is captured, his travel time is captured and something which was done on paper earlier and once in a month taken to office, entered that data into the system and all the payments and all are generated, that's got digitized. The approval of that time booking is also done by supervisor on the job. So that's the process. But digital transformation for me is a collection of such individual digitalizations with a larger business objective. Let me give another example from our parent company Larson and Tubro. So the Larson and Tubro found that they wanted to improve their profitability and that objective was looked at with what are the pain points. The pain points were so many construction sites, so many equipment, many of them are leased, many of the workers are actually contract workers, not our employees, how many people report at a site, how many people on what particular day everything was done on paper. Now the biggest pain points were derived that we do not know where is my material, where is my equipment. So we decided to censorized our equipment, for example cranes and you know if I have to lift a 14 ton object and I get a 25 ton crane, is it really necessary? Is there a crane nearby which can do the job when transported about 2 kilometers or even 5 kilometers? So all of that together we decided to censorize starting collecting data and over a period of time derived objectives that how we can optimize the movement of equipment and movement of material. So I think that larger business objective of optimizing material, optimizing equipment is one such example of digital transformation. In the earlier example the digital transformation objective would be for the OTC elevators is to optimize the repair workforce or just do the repair job right in time before time or if something has taken five visits or six visits of a mechanic, if you can cut it down three visits it will translate something XYZ, X amount of dollars in terms of your work. I think that is the digital transformation in my opinion. Great example Dr. Rudeh, in fact it also kind of reflects on how we can actually get so much of data you just talked about and how we can create models on the top of this data to kind of add to our bottom line through that data if we basically go into digitalization and I'm just going to come back to you Sudeep shortly. I'm going to kind of bring in the audience opinion on this. Vishak was running the poll while we were kind of talking about digitalization versus transformation. Vishak what does our audience have to say on this? Yeah so you know thank you for the great opinions to panelists the audience have also spoken right so they are saying you know what the first word when it comes to digitization digital transformation that comes into my mind is automation efficiency having everything on mobile traceability technology the experience increased ROI very very interesting points in B. So that's when I would like to bring in Sudeep now here Sudeep what are your initial reactions to what these audiences are actually saying these words and also tell us an example of what are the most unexpected of places where digital has impacted in your organization as such. So thanks very much Ankud and Vishak for bringing me in and I think Ashish and Rudeh actually gave a great start and talked about a lot of important things but let me just pick up what Rudeh said last time to my last company so I can just take a straw from there what he said that you know if you look at the one last he mentioned which is basically you know when we sensitized and we kind of digitalized 12,000 equipment so the impact obviously the digital transformation impacts everything not only inside or outside as well right and that's what the transformation is all about transform doesn't transformation is not about your own institution but also outside so that's the transformation but important in this is how it can impact somebody else within the organization forget the outside within the organization and it's a kind of an unthinkable some of the terms let me just look at it you know if such kind of stuff is going on digitalization or digital as we're going in an organization what generally who never takes part in that which function never takes part in that maybe sometimes legal yeah they think that nothing has changed in the world in our world so I'm talking about the legal world maybe sometimes procurement as well nothing has changed this technology it's the business it's the guys who are the site etc let me give an example on how it impacted them and nobody could understand how it could impact right so let's look at one of the equipment that we purchased it was an outright purchase Elinti does actually let's not take the name but it does we outright purchase from some of the companies right which we are one of the largest company largest capital expender so we got this equipment it was put into action it was taking out the data obviously of soil it was a subsoil work and the company said that and we said that you know what we need to understand what's there because we need to understand the substrate right so subsoil and they said no we can't give you the data because data is ours I said hang on you know we did that discussion we said that you know hang on there because the data is from the soil I bought the equipment outright purchase no string attached how can you say that the data is yours no so data is our because technology is ours technology is patented so we can't give you the data then we actually had a discussion and I had that's very hard discussion I said that you know what two counts we can we can we can have a very hard dialogue here one I have outrightly purchased that in equipment you can't say that this is yours and the data is yours when the data cannot go outside India because as for the legal legal definition residents cannot be outside the second one is anything below two meters it's a government property not anybody's property you can't just take anything actually you know what now then so what is the impact impact is on the procurement next time the procurement goes to the procurement I mean the purchasing the machine they need to make sure that they talk about these right so that nobody can come back and say that the technologies ours material is yours money is yours and data is somebody else's legal so squarely impacted because they need to have that legal you know support for the procurement so sometimes we feel that it's a technology it's a it's a field is the operator is the equipment no this is squarely you know this may squarely impact your legal your procurement your finance lot of people so we need to understand that that that a neural network of impact within the organization right generally we don't we don't understand that we don't we do think there's a local impact actually it has global impact I'm not going beyond the boundary actually it is the beyond the boundary case if you look at it talks about data residency it talks about whose data it is whose rights on the data right even government culture can be involved in that so it's a that's why it is a transformation case it is not mere digitalization or digitization it's a it transforms the way we look at our digital intervention right thank you true I mean very well said today right and I'm agreeing to all of the three part of the panelists the interesting aspects here is and I want to show you this as well right the audience also you know unanimously agrees right the most voted terms over here is automation and change we just talked about this right change transformation be ready for this that's what the the major thing that's going to actually come it's going to come idea when it comes to digitization or digital transformation thank you so much back to you uncle for the next question meanwhile I'll prep the audience to have their views on some other topics yeah sure thanks a lot Vishak and by the way I really like someone wrote 24 by 7 so that's a great perspective to look at digitalization so great great insight into what our audience think so I think so we basically when we talk to our customer we typically look at digital transformation from five buckets perspective acquisition conversion customer servicing retention and loyalty and customer servicing is you know one anchor from where retention and loyalty you know kind of drives so my question to you Ashish is since you are you know kind of in a B2C kind of a business when you look at customer servicing retention and loyalty what are the things as a CTO your organization feels challenged with and what is it that basically keeps you up at night and you know continues to you know drive you harder and harder to basically drive that digitalization and the customer experience so obviously the whole customer surface fulfillment satisfaction is a very very big index for most companies not just B2C but especially so for B2C and within B2C insurance I think it's even more relevant because it's not a natural product it's not an instinctive product it's not a product that has a low bar of satisfaction right so you don't really buy insurance until somebody around you has an event and then has successfully made a claim and then you're like dude that guy would have gotten Roger if he had not got insurance and let me also get insurance or the converse also happens that guy got Roger because he did not have insurance so let me get insurance so in that sense for us it's make or break it's no longer about helping us acquire more customers or you know a bit more growth rate a bit more profitability it's actually survival for us because the moment people feel you're not paying claims either enough or in time that's where your brand gets killed you can do any level of marketing after that it's not going to pull you back so in that sense it is critical it is extremely time bound remember that half of our claims are cashless which means that the person is at the hospital and imagine the pressure on that right you are actually making a person wait in the hospital while you are taking a decision on the claim and imagine a downtime or a performance issue at that time so if you ask me and I've been in a lot of industries right I've never felt that pressure that I feel here that a downtime would at maximum lose you some sale it will lose you some level of customer satisfaction here you're actually telling a person that hey look our systems are not working can you please stay in the hospital for one more day and you know you can go home tomorrow what's the rush what's there at your home right and imagine trying to say that to a customer I mean imagine if somebody said that to you you wouldn't even understand what the what the hell was going on so I think I think in this industry it's even more critical and we're trying our maximum amount of effort in actually making that experience actually as seamless as possible so we talked about the other side of claim which is reimbursement claims where you go home and make a claim that has been completely digitized and now we're trying to figure out digitized and now we're trying to figure out ways of automating it we're also trying to do the same for a real-time claim such that the adjudication so we built a fairly robust rule engine that we intend to deploy for claims very soon we've already deployed it for our issuance process which is the sales process now we are trying to deploy it for our claims process wherein you know if all the data is there then a human being really doesn't add that much value right so claim can actually why should a claim take so we have a 30 minutes promise why should the claim actually take even 30 minutes why can't it but if we done in 30 seconds why can't you know why can't every customer why can't a person in a hospital never be told that hey we are waiting for the insurance company to approve your claim and that's my wish list and and that's what keeps me excited as well as you know keeps me up at night awesome awesome that's a great thought Ashish in fact you know all those buzzwords the cloud that we just saw you know they were popping up when you were talking the 24 by 7 the time to react with the digitalization how that has basically become one of the challenges that you basically discussed I think Dr. Uday I would like to kind of take your view on one thing that was also there in those buzzwords but at the same time sometimes keeps the CIOs up which is the security the traceability of the data what is your view on that you know how can you know digitalization be ensured and then get secure and you know keep the customer content and you know secure while you are going through this transformation okay so let me attempt to that though I don't claim to be a security expert but I think one everybody knows this but I'm just repeating the security has to be built in writing the and in the design and in the implementation it cannot be an afterthought now having said that take example of banking or insurance there is a customer data that is there and the customer data is getting stored and the the company is like insurance and in banking sector they will have really really large liabilities so one is it is about data security storing the data securely accessing that data and then while there is a transaction that is happening okay I mean OS compliance OS 2.0 compliance or we have said something very specific in healthcare industry there is HIPAA compliance about personal medical data etc while there is a transactions ending the mobile application there is another challenge you store data locally right you may not have connectivity all the time so mobile application most of the time they have to work on offline mode unlike the web application and that therein lies and mobile devices are much more vulnerable to theft and unauthorized usage etc etc so essentially very important but it has to be designed right in the system so much so that the software services company like Allante Infotech there is a separate security practice which comes into picture for any project implementation yeah and I don't want to get into technical details of network security data security application security but yes this is something which is built into the design that's the point I want to derive from yeah all right I think I think that's a that's a great point that Dr. Uday mentioned that it has to be baked into the system it is not something that you can just build on the go so you have to basically invest in more standardized you know platform where you basically have the security tested through and through the data is there and there is a lot of standardization around the workflows and things like that as well Vishak do you want to bring you know our peoples our audience opinion into what do they feel about the whole aspect of this sure there is a very interesting you know opinion from our audiences and I would like to throw this question to Sudeep you first and then to you Ashish right we asked them hey you know what where do you expect digital to have the maximum impact on right and you know I expect you know your opinion do you agree with this they're saying you know what the maximum impact I want these are senior executives participating as into this particular discussion they're saying the number one and number two are operational efficiency and customer experience they're saying saving cost and generating revenue those I don't know where I think they're thinking that hey that's a byproduct eventually going to come in what are your opinion Sudeep if I can start with you and then move on to Ashish they put my perspective actually the one and three is probably correlated in two and four are correlated in my in my view yeah because whenever you generate efficiency out of the system it actually saves cost because you are doing things faster right that's one secondly is customer experience when the customer is happy with the experience is good obviously we'll be expecting some more more products or more frequency of the products to be purchased or some good words flowing to influence others to buy your product right so I think it's a but most important thing is that you know coming back to this important thing one is efficiency generation as a revenue generation let me put in these two categories now efficiency generation if I look at it my current organization right where we are putting up a DNA which is digital and analytics academy which is where we will we are actually investing in building talent and and through advanced analytics we are looking at the operational efficiency so what is it the operational efficiency that we are doing it's simple is we are we have sensitized you know different parts of the organization different parts of the manufacturing we're getting the data as you know we we spoke about earlier but through advanced analytics we are developing different kinds of model to understand the behavior of various variables and actually we are looking at how to optimize that and make it more efficient and if you look at I mean you know some of the times we don't understand even but we obviously get benefits even energy consumption right how do you make it and then I can take this into a different category energy consumption is nothing but sustainability right not only operational efficiency but also much larger topic of transformation sustainability achieving sustainability I think I think I can clearly see that where people are coming from my experience I could go you know pages after pages on these and each of these topic number of interventions but I largely agree with with what you said the customer experience is very important one more thing a lot of times we feel that you know sensitization and digitization actually or you know it will be giving us the more efficiency and saving cost yes that's a measurable and very quickly the customer experience and led by customer experience generating revenue it could be a lead lag it's a lag variable a little bit that's why sometimes we get tempted by looking at the lead variable or kind of immediate return and lead variable rather than a lag variable so I can largely agree with what audience said and you have to really think about your own organizations how do you go for digital transformation or digitalization because that gives you the perspectives whether you will be looking at very short-term impact create the believability go for a long-term impact or you stay in the short-term impact because you know that there could be some more and more or sometimes you just I'll not look at the short-term impact I'll only look at the long-term impact because I'd lead the organization you know three year down the roads to be the global leader if that is the case so you'll have a different opinions and different options with you but largely fantastic agree with them so before you bring in Vishak Ashish's opinion I know he has a hard stop I would like to just add a layer to this question or the people opinion so Ashish I know that Max Bupa is going through rebranding True North basically a quiet 51% stake from Max India so because you transformed all of your processes and everything into a digital format do you also see the you know what people opinion is coming did you achieve operational efficiency while going through that rebranding or did you you know save a lot of cost while basically going through that transformation from Max Bupa to True North branding Ashish yeah absolutely so so I think I think we did achieve a lot of that but I think I think our experience and again I think there's a context to the answers that the audience also gave you saw operational efficiency as number one and you know revenue as number four and I'll tell you why that is I'll add my philosophy and I'll add a touch of controversy by going the other way instead of agreeing I think that depends on how wide your canvas is and when most people think digital the first thing that's coming to my mind to the mind is I do something I have a company that's running a process how do I bring digital into this now if you're bringing digital into something quite obviously operational efficiency customer satisfaction would be number one but just widen the horizon and and ask the question what can digital do for me and then you'll suddenly see realize that revenue will become number one so look at the digital revolutions around us don't look at just your company look at the digital revolution around you look at what's happened at tech let's look at what's happened in food tech let's have let's look at what happened at least pre-covid in in in uh taxi transformation right these are all digital transformations of an existing offline industry and what is that done the first thing it's done is generate massive amount of revenues not just for the person who did the digitalization by the way but for the industry today we eat far more out of home food uh because there's a Zomato and a Swiggy right our parents I couldn't like like my parent my my dad would like shoot me before he booked a taxi right he'd rather not have a son than have a son who booked a taxi right that's the honest truth right but today you know when I say that hey you know uh why don't you come over I'll come and pick you up the first sentence he says is that I'll take an Uber and come why do you want to come pick me up these are things that could have never happened so industries have been transformed even if you look at the whole travel the travel became accessible hotels flights became so convenient the whole industry like boom ranked uh just because of the digital transformation so I think I think it depends on the uh canvas if you ask yourself a question saying I have a process what can digital do for that process then operational but if you widen the horizon and say hey what can I use digital for you'll actually find revenue is actually uh number one and for us that's been the story uh because what's happened in this uh last year because that coincided with the transition that you asked me about is what's happened is that go it's happened and insurance has hitherto been a fairly offline industry you either visited a bank branch or your agent or you called an agent home and the moment that got disrupted all of us who were more digital than maybe some of the others got a massive advantage our growth rates are I mean not to be arrogant but our growth rates have been positively impacted by the fact that we were able to be more more digital and the industry hasn't grown out of whack but some of our growth rates are out of whack uh right and and positively so so I think I think it's a little bit to do with the canvas uh I think if you open up your mind uh I think you'll realize that revenue is the first thing that comes to your mind because revenue is the first thing that anybody is willing to fund by the way and that's why you keep hearing these debates on you know how do I fund my digital transformation uh how do I convince my CEO to give me money easiest ways to make more money than you're spending so if you tell your CEO that give me 10 gurus I'll give you 15 back who's gonna send over to you and I think that's always been my approach that you know between incremental revenue uh and cost saving uh the ROI should be greater than 100% and then you don't need the CEO to approve any project so that's that's my take on it I'm good by the way I'm around for the full time uh I don't have a hard stop anymore awesome awesome I was already enjoying our conversation so great that you are there with us and a great perspective so uh in in fact Vishak the way he kind of uh you know uh uh I would say converge the three points into the revenue uh you know so it kind of makes sense that it is a funnel operational efficiency all these will actually lead to the revenue uh I would like to kind of take Dr Uday's view on this so I'm going to kind of go one level down the appeal the onion a little bit so uh you know uh talk about a very important topic you have already touched about it a little bit when you talked about the Otis elevator example how people uh your mechanics basically started using mobile application to basically punch in their numbers then conventional uh you know paper forms uh started using I guess uh you know uh non-traditional workflows in a digital format and you had uh you know suddenly access to all this data uh in fact I I have a number from a national study from AIM a single paper form is going to cost a business 3.83 dollar to process and and uh we are processing and turning so many paper forms so how can organizations justify and quantify the cost so some of it Ashish has already talked about but how can organizations develop a metric surrounded to basically justify this cost how as Ashish mentioned if you you know kind of simplify it and look it from a wider lens you can go to your CEO ask for that cost and it all makes sense but how does procurement basically you know put it in a matrix and justify these costs and also bring in the non-quantifiable factors uh like for example the manners spent processing those forms or to handle the errors and omission I I read some study which mentioned that uh banking industry uh loses million of dollars in errors and omission how how we do bring those non-quantifiable data into the matrix when evaluating the cost of this digitalization good good good question so uh first of all I uh agree with Ashish that if you put it in a way uh that it will generate more revenue than what you are going to spend I think the app was both very smoothly and you don't have to uh go back and forth with your CEOs and CEOs um for the non-quantifiable uh where the time collective bandwidth of senior management is spent on on the processes approval and if something goes wrong correcting that you know and not to speak that when something goes wrong and if it is a customer facing process there is a dissatisfaction that is generated directly impacting customer experience and I think that will really impact talking about non-tangible objectives so let me give an example of ministry of corporate affairs which is our customer and which is where LNP infotech has implemented adobe form-based solution so if you see it's a very complex organization ministry of corporate affairs huge amount of services uh first of all they have a enormous amount of content right in terms of their citizens charter the manuals the notifications and all these compliance information etc huge amount of acts like right from company act competition at partnership and what not even society registration activity quite a humongous amount of services right from DIN services directors information so LNP limited liability partnership companies so it's all digitalized or I would say digitally transformed now you may argue that if if you have a form which is digitalized and converted it into a digital form it's a digitalization and not a digital transformation right but I look at it in a different way to me a digital transformation of something like NCA ministry of corporate affairs where huge amount of services right from your as I said DIN services LNP services the compliance reporting quarterly filing and what not every time a partner is resigning partner is on board you need to file they got something like 108 forms all included and they have to be filled they have to be applied also previously people used to fill them in uh be a format and then try to upload the upload went wrong and you have to start all over again and also the fact that if you made a mistake somewhere in filling the form it is the further workflow related to that mistake is triggered only after the form is processed offline but now if you have a web based form it gets caught then and there and it's basically it doesn't allow any mistake to happen so if if now I look at it from the perspective of digital transformation the objective remember the first question I answered where I said there has to be an objective the objective here is to go up in the ease of doing business internationally and what does that mean for India it's not just an achievement going five faces or 10 places up in the list it translates to investment inflow for India it translates therefore this money goes into creating jobs and this creating jobs actually uplift the people from poverty so I wanted to give that perspective for the digital transformation and this is this is an example where you know all this intangible time spent the number of resources that are required for processing all those forms and then there are chances of human error both while form filling or while improving and and the amount of person hours lost okay this is something a great example at the moment great great example Dr. Rudeh in fact seems like now my company secretary will not be able to salvage money from me for filing some forms that he probably might not have and I'll have a better control over my company data what is going into mca so I'm already looking forward to you know looking at this I guess digitally transform mca site so we talked about this whole metrics Dr. Rudeh talked about some aspects the portion to you Sudeh in your organization how does your team at CIO level or at procurement level you know basically brings all these factors in while basically justifying the cost of you know this cost of digitalization or bringing you know converting paper to digital and you know investing in digital workflows how do you do it at your organization Sudeh you need to unmute sorry so I think it has got multiple elements to be honest first of all justification if I look at the entire digital portfolio justification there are different ways to do it and it's not easy some of the times because new technology new era needs new way of looking at ROI if you are thinking of looking at 80s lens and justification of blockchain I'm sorry nobody can justify the blockchain in that case I mean it's difficult to justify not nobody can I'm trying myself so that's one part of it second part of it is there are different ways there are some direct measurement right or direct measurement is you know how many forms are there like I can give you plenty of example like again the last organization we did simple safety and the quality checks which were being done on paper and we actually simply digitize that and we did 4.2 million A4 pages we saved in one year right so and paper saving is directly related to number of trees cut you know so many tons of carbon carbon dioxide you know you save the carbon footprint right so I can matrix is what kind of metric will be using it's up to you and not only always a metric you know it depends on the same metric can be looked at from multiple angles depending on multiple forums again as as you said what canvas you are using right if I using a sustainability canvas I'll do it differently if I took it if I talk to CFO I'll talk numbers right but having said that I think it's some practical you know we are also doing lots of work these digital forms and it's just digital workflow for service for supply chain etc we are doing lots of stuff with Adobe as well but important is I think to understand that ultimately if you want to build a digital ecosystem within our company outside the company data is important I think the forms are not to be looked at a form for today it should be looked at a goldmine of data for tomorrow right so the processes the amount of processes that you are digital digitalizing or digital whatever the term you call the amount of data from the processes direct as well as some other processes if you get that your analytics will be far superior than many right and that's what exactly we are trying to do we have gone from digital to analytic stage as I told you that you know I just like to explain that the advanced analytics academy we are looking at data from every possible sources including these digital forms so where is it going how is it going from there and so that you know there's no intervention also the people we are just taking direct from the server and putting in our data lake and trying to match with the with the type of mines actually we are we are getting the raw materials from similarly we are also looking at you know what kind of what kind of transportation that we used you know whether there can be better transportation so many things we are doing I can't just talk all these points at this point time but the effort is on right so one part is direct measurement uh second part is this leap of faith the belief that it'll help because the processes are getting you know you're not going going to our customers are going to our suppliers every now and then with a with a handheld form and say that you know sign on it you know that used to be done pre 1947 era that the sign is required sign but the third part is is generating for the future generating data for the future in fact if you look at this I can't have an ROI at this time I can have a ROI I can't tell that you know what ROI is this but what I believe is the amount of data we are getting and when you when you match it up with my transportation match it up with my people's locations to match it up with my my sources like as I talked about mines and the and the the quality of the raw material specs etc from there and the amount of data that we are getting and matching it up I mean it can it is doing wonder that's what I'm saying I can't just say everything but I can tell you this already started doing wonder and just in the interest of my IP I can't say too much but I can tell you that have some belief before you go into that and I'm telling you the the amount of surprise that you'll be getting in terms of money later on the which you cannot justify in any of the excel sheets or ROI tool that that has been given to you yeah great great input Sudeep in fact you have drawn some new tangents and trust me my sales team is going to bug you to take coaching from you because the way you have justified how to kind of look at the investment into digitalization I think it will make for a great sales pitch for my team for sure so I actually have a lot more questions but I think I would like to kind of take a pause and see Vishak if our audience has any questions and they would like to kind of ask a panelist or anything yes definitely and I'm going to pick my favorite for this time which is people wants practical examples right so give us some quick wins right so which I can quickly as a CIO or CTO can quickly cover it which will have some some significant impact on revenue and cost I think what part of what this particular questionnaire wants to know is give us some examples give some tips and tricks quick wins or you know fail past whatever that is and before I pass it over to the panel I want to answer it with one of the examples that we recently did which is a very quick win as such one of the organizations that we work with said hey I want to automate the entire onboarding process for new employees because everybody's joining remote right and I have to have them sign PF forms fill it sign it their agreements and whatnot everything send it ship it career it whatnot whatnot and we sort of completely automate that entire employee onboarding process right from the HRMS till you know automatically shipping the new laptop to their houses because we are all working in a remote economy as such right so we did this entire automated project thanks to amazing solutions that Ruby has built with local platforms with AM forms and it will be signed so that we have verified Aadha authenticated signatures saying that yes I agree to whatever that you actually said in the employment agreement and start to end testing you know try out shipment everything 30 days flat and today on a daily basis they onboard more than 100 employees using this particular platform that was one example which I had to share now over to you Ashish if you can answer with some some quick wins from your experience and then we'll go to that answer they want that yeah I mean I mean there are plenty that come to my mind I've already talked about a couple so I'll just repeat them and add a layer so like one was definitely the whole reimbursement claims process when COVID hit we didn't have the luxury of saying we'll take six months to build a process so please hold on and you know fund your hospitalization for the next six months that's a project that moves from 5% digital to 95% digital in a matter of I think about 45 to 50 days so that's one project that comes to my mind huge impact significant impact not just on customer satisfaction but actually on cost because the amount of time we were spending in taking getting those careers punching in all the data was just humongous right so not only did it impact customer satisfaction but big impact on on cost the other one again is the rule engine again end to end it went live from conceptualization to go live in about 60 days this is where the customer self declares their medical question is it's a responsive question as a change is based on what you say yes and no to and takes more details and then the automation happens that the the the response of the underwriting is presented right there to the customer even before they buy the policy now I'll tell you why that's significant one it's great customer satisfaction I buy a policy I issue the policy immediately nobody's manually looking at it second imagine the experience in which we reject a policy after taking money from the customers the customers paid now somebody looks at the form and says hey we can't pay this guy we can't give this guy policy because of some medical declaration imagine how bad that is for the customer now you go back to the customer and say hey I'm sorry we can't really issue a policy and the customers like by the hell did you take my money in the first place right so from a customer satisfaction from a cost saving perspective and now definitely what's been told to me by the sales team is that it's become a big revenue generator as well because that is something that we are able to pitch which not a lot of other companies are so the sales team goes in and says that serve with that company you know this will undergo a process and you'll get your policy in 15 days here you know the decision so if the decision is okay you'll actually get the policy within the next few minutes and that becomes a big sales tool so both impact on cost and revenue there. Thank you Ashish. Dr. Uday would you like to share some examples quick wins. Yeah of course I would like to share a couple of them so the first one I will go back to the MCA Ministry of Corporate Affairs I think if you look at in the numbers perspective I already talked about something like more than 100,000 forms but there are 21 lakh plus companies and more than 2 lakh limited reliability partnerships so average filing per day happens to be up close to the range of 30,000 and in peak period it goes to something like 45 to 50,000 per day is the filing amount that happens in this application so and even if it is a non-peak period it will be nothing less than 20,000 files per day so look at the amount of time that used to be wasted when I submit a PDF file and there is some error in that it is rejected so something like it is which was taking 20-30 minutes for small forms and 30-45 minutes for larger forms the time has come down to something like 10 minutes or even less than that okay so that's and per filing and now you can just multiply do the math and see almost 60,000 plus hours daily kind of saving and I again I go back to my earlier statement that what it does it actually contributes to the ease of doing business and then I talked about going up in the ladder and in flow etc so that's a very good example of digitization saving time and ultimately achieving the objective. The other ones I could give is about banking you know and it is not a one single program but in banking I think typically banks have taken customer onboarding as a separate process and then there is an Intel banking or SLE banking loan origination and then ultimately wealth management so if you are now talking about a customer who has been onboarded either for a bank account or for a card or for a loan then taking them into the actual running the business the operational part of it and then taking that customer to the wealth management we are talking here about now loyalty so a lot of data capturing deep personalization that is all will have to be done so I think it was well said that a form is just a form or but for someone that form is actually a data right so and if you capture that data your ultimate objective is to go to the customer retention and loyalty and take him to the wealth management the banking itself. Thank you, thank you Uday for sharing the banking example as well as the ease of doing business right I mean experience is experience whether your customer is an individual or a company it remains an experience to be delivered yeah. Sudeep over to you to our audience what are the quick wins some of the tips and tricks I think is what the audience is expecting. Sorry Vashak I'm just adding a layer to that portion for Sudeep. Sudeep has brought in a very interesting angles so Sudeep since you have served on both side of the table you know with your LTI stand and now in a product company so what are the quick wins that companies can and organization generally can achieve in two three months time what are the low hanging foods that a company should target for can you can you give some insight from that perspective. So that's what actually what I said earlier you know the approach and what Ashish said also the canvas context is very important yeah Ashish actually pointed out very nicely that you have to come from which context I mean rather you have to come from a right context well while you take the or the quick wins now typically his industry and the manufacturing industry a little different right that's why manufacturing industry generally has seen that for Sudeep going to directly into manufacturing but typically if you look at Indian manufacturing sector I mean I'm no no no disrespect or no belittling anybody but I think there are lots of opportunities in the Indian manufacturing sector right the very man lot of things are quite manual and can be done automated so the more automation you do the more data you get the more data you get the more advanced analytics is important for you know when you are looking for quick wins so quick wins is generally in my view over the last you know quite a few years on digital and it both look at take say digitalization commitment of digitalization from the CXO will be obtained or will be reinforced when you show the return quickly and that quickly return means typical three months return right it's a it's as Gardner says that in a by model or whatever it is I'm just going into that direction but first is you'll have to show some benefit and show benefit in those and choose those area where actually you think beneficial will be realized that manufacturing is one of them again from manufacturing point of view I'm coming back coming right even in construction also we have seen that so first is and don't look at more than three to four months of wave yeah look at the waves look at very short waves cases or I mean the the short use came in three to four months use cases and before you go try to look at what value you can extract number one number two is that look at to extract that value do you have the right kind of data and is it feasible both important right kind of data is there but feasible is not that feasible is not because you don't have the data scientist or maybe you don't have the right kind of qualified people or maybe some other is your structure is not ready organization is not ready could be both right both the way so look at that and then jump into right and try to make it a very intense effort so that within three months you can show some benefits you do four months show some benefit and it is to be validated also as much as possible by the finance yeah take them along so it's a collaborative so that's I think the first mantra second is there will be some initiatives which will be longer than others in my view in the manufacturing sector you know what happened is changing a product is quite difficult right some new product development is even more difficult even it's it takes time right so so by the way of you know changing new product in the physical product segment possibly will be I would say it's a buy models longer longer short arm should be look at manufacturing look at procurement procurement I've seen in all companies in the past procurement makes gives you money look at very simple in your I mean you know we we used to say that look at simply your ERP look at how many duplications are there of a single master single master item right I'm not going to the numbers but same same item you'll see that there are hundreds I mean the larger the company more the variation it's simple we did we did in entity we did I did in Pyramid both the places are very same thing actually we looked at the number master item and we simply saw that you know we have purchased the same item in 100 ways just make sure within the band right so procurement manufacturing they are the clear quick shot that you can have you know you can shoot at because there will be money and once you generate the believability of the management then you'll see that the the purse is opening yeah because why the management is not open today it's another beast for them right they think all the all the people love to talk any CXO love to talk about digital any CXO I can tell you because if you're not talking doing later not talking you're a dodo so you will be talking but the purse string doesn't open so quickly right to open that you have to show that elements of you know believability but one more thing sorry I know the time is very don't take the technology which may show a little lag benefit yeah like blockchain it's fantastic to go for whatever I'm doing it I know but can you show anything on the blockchain in three months I believe they'll have to just look at it if you can fantastic if you can't don't take it took it a little different track but take those IOT AIML is a nice track to take yeah it shows benefit right there are lots of lots of other things are there you know which can show benefit in fact AR VR XR technologies will benefit the CX space right I don't know on the insurance space we'll have to think of how do we use that but suddenly where there is a physical product there could be a great example of generating revenue or saving cost and impact impact should be within three to four months if you are not look at your portfolio once again very quickly add to your question uncle from my personal experience it is a slightly lighter note to share but I tell you the one that I find the easiest and the lowest hanging fruit is is a digitalization of processes to eliminate manpower cost and I tell you why that's always the low hanging fruit if you review 20 if you if you look at a new setup and review 20 manual processes I can guarantee you you will find four that don't need to be digitalized that are not required at all so in your digital roadmap what always happens is those four projects with zero investment zero budgets being approved by the CEO CFO you already have four wins because if you go to a person and says why do you do it you'll always get a justification but if you go to 20 people and say that let's digitize this you'll find four examples where people tell you you can't do it, leave it, it has no benefit, it was a problem earlier to solve it it is no longer relevant and you have your four big wins in maybe a month two months suddenly you have a very good portfolio suddenly you can go back and make all your presentation saying look already 1 crore has been saved now give me 1 crore so that I can save another 2 crore I think that's something that's always worked for me I don't know one organization where I haven't been able to eliminate three four processes that were at least a couple of crores or or so in saving. So great input in fact I think long story short Veshak the summary of it that I can kind of find out from Sudeep's point is go for things that drive quick value and go by the 80-20 rule as per Ashish because you will get the 80% value in the 20% items that you can find in the organization I see that our audience actually has a lot more interesting question than me probably we should let the audience moderate this discussion you want to bring some more questions very quickly we are short on time yeah I think what we need to do is we have two questions which we cannot avoid because of the votes that these questions has but we would want to do it in a rapid fire fashion right so there are two questions and let me tell you these are from two different planets but you know in a rapid fire fashion piece every push put up those questions first so the first question here is how do you justify high upfront cost of investment right for any digital project to start with at the same time on the same time we have the pressure of lower TCO of implementation projects as such I think I mean you guys are better than at this give us in a rapid fire answer you know what do you think what is your answer to the public how do you justify high cost of upfront investment versus so very very small answer huge fan of not having high cost of front huge fan right so so yeah I never try to justify because nobody's been able to justify it to me just don't do it excellent answer yeah I would say slang big but break it up okay and project it a small one at a time and that that's the way to do it dream big start small excellent how about you Siddhi so I said that the high cost itself is a very relative term if you look at the value is high take it if you if you think the value is not but remember the time frame three to four months if you do delay more than that I think people are not going to believe you true true cost is a function of value figure the value first yeah very well and time and time of course yes cost is a function of value and time excellent moving on to the next question this is a question about blockchain right so the question here is okay we talked about this thing which is the panels here on blockchain adoption by organization in India related to smart contracts and stuff for that so Ashish over to you highly overrated sorry I know I should be saying more positive things about blockchain but highly overrated I think I think implementation is one thing but but there's an ecosystem blockchain is not a technology it's an ecosystem and I think I think very few people are realizing that it's only the financial world has that has realized realized that blockchain is an ecosystem it's not it's not the technology you can do everything blockchain can without blockchain yeah until you are invested into the ecosystem I think I think it's not for everybody it's a very nice piece of stuff wait and watch for more is killing you if I can summarize it yeah yeah yeah over to you doctor right yeah I think I just echo Ashish answer it's about the ecosystem any technology when that has to be adopted if you see that Gardner height curve that actually transition happens because there are other related technologies which have not matured and therefore the adoption will take time well put right sir so if sir how do you inevitable the more the disputes in the world more the mistrust in the world inevitable it's a question of time when it gets matured it's a question of time when we adopt it excellent well put so I think I think Vishat one thing that I realize is that we have got a great panel for a fireside chat I can actually do a copy with current kind of a show with this panel wish we had a longer time in this panel discussion today we would have you know lot more questions and in fact audience brought in some great question I think we'll probably close with that question which I would like to summarize overall view of the panel today absolutely thank you uncle for being the partner in crime and thank you so much panelists for sharing your viewpoints today my key takeaways if I can put it in these many words digitization digitalization digital transformation those are terms focus on value end result think of the canvas and execution focus on execution right all panelists had their say on this topic right then it comes to practical aspect of digitalization start looking into if I can actually top of my recall start start looking into your processes that's the biggest opportunity to optimize them and if need be to digitize them as such in a quick fashion right dream big think small execute smaller minimum viable product you don't have to have carry a large investment to do any of digitization digitalization digital transformation as such excellent example be it making the doing business in India you know so easy be it an experience that organization are getting today to employ onboarding to policy servicing to order management everything right under one umbrella it's hot off the press as such and needless to say we are seeing that there's a burst of customers right be it a business as a customer for a b2b or a b2c customer that were previously unknown to all of us because of the unusual growth in digital mobile as such which is like two third of the companies are saying yes we are seeing a new bunch of customers as such it we should be better prepared and better organized and we can start small with these particular processes and digitization allow me to summarize it in this way this was an excellent conversation thank you for sharing your viewpoints and example and I would like to personally thank Ashish Dr. Daya and Sudheep for spending your valuable time with us and of course our beloved audience for giving us all those fantastic questions and ratings giving it a direction to the discussion thank you so much look forward to all of to partner with all of you in the future thank you and I have a great evening our pleasure thank you very much thank you very much thank you