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    Infosys revamps processes across verticals to boost productivity

    Synopsis

    The initiative, which is internally being called the “Process Plus Plus Initiative,” was actually conceptualised nearly 12 months ago.

    ET Bureau
    BENGALURU/NEW DELHI: India’s second largest software exporter Infosys has undertaken a large-scale reboot of existing internal systems and processes, including across functions such as finance, travel and human resources, as part of a broader strategy to improve productivity across the company and also save costs, a top company executive said.

    The initiative, which is internally being called the “Process Plus Plus Initiative,” was actually conceptualized nearly 12 months ago when the company was revamping policies around dress code for employees and other employee-friendly measures and has since evolved into a broader revamp exercise across the company’s different verticals and service lines, Infosys’s operations chief Pravin Rao said.

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    “While we strive to provide services to our clients in a much better way, we are also looking at similar things for our stakeholders, including internal stakeholders. Internally we wanted to transform our processes so that we could improve our operational efficiency,” said Rao in an interview on Tuesday. “Fundamentally we wanted to renew systems, processes and policies so that employee experiences could be very good,” he added.

    The exercise was rolled out in two phases and traces its roots back to the “Murmuration” initiative that CEO Vishal Sikka put in place shortly after taking charge as part of a strategy to get employees to proactively come up with more innovative ideas, Rao said.

    As part of this revamp exercise, Infosys even created a separate unit called the Corporate Strategic Initiative which is being headed by Srividhya VS who leads strategic initiatives inside the company.

    “We wanted to bring about at least 2X improvements all across,” said Rao, adding that as part of this exercise the company deployed heavy levels of automation within the company to replace manual, repetitive processes and also worked on simplifying things like travel approvals for employees, which previously required a number of approvals from their managers.

    In the second phase, Infosys started revamping processes such as global mobility and procurement orders. Lastly, Infosys tasked each of its verticals and functions to take part in this exercise and revamp existing processes.

    Another top company executive, who declined to be identified, elaborated that in functions such as finance, Infosys had undertaken a revamp of all finance teams across the company’s five verticals as part of this broader exercise. Processes around areas such as employee training, maternity leave and travel reimbursement also underwent a reboot.

    Infosys also undertook a broader cost-savings initiative called “Optiwise”, in which it invited ideas on saving costs from employees across the company.

    In an email to employees on on January 8, Rao wrote: “...why don’t we look around and find areas, resources and ways we can optimize our operations, our projects and our teams? Together, let’s ‘Optiwise’. Let’s make this the new buzz word at Infy and let’s join hands in this endeavor to save time, energy, resources and increase our productivity.”

    Rao declined to share exact figures on how much quantifiable improvement this exercise has yielded, but according to internal emails, the 200 plus changes across the organization in 15 different processes resulted in at least a 10-15% drop in costs. More than 2000 cost saving ideas were submitted by employees as part of this exercise, of which a little over 200 were selected -- which included cost saving exercises such as forecasting using historical data and faster travel approvals.
    The Economic Times

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