Sri Lankan Leasing Company

The economic viability of a region largely depends on securing financing from various sources such as public and private entities. Robust credit facilities are therefore an important subset that contribute significantly to growth. An emerging economy thrives on financing as one of its crucial parameters to sustain growth. With an array of businesses of varying scale joining the growth bandwagon, Sri Lanka was faced with the demand of establishing a robust pool of leasing entities to meet capital requirements. In 1980, the Sri Lanka Government, on the recommendation of the World Bank, decided to set up a framework for financing in the form of flexible leasing to further the economic prospects of the country.

In Sri Lanka, leasing is an industry where many stakeholders, including the government, play an active role in everyday business operations, thereby generating a significant volume of information relevant to the industry and the consumers.

A renowned Sri Lankan leasing company, catering to multifarious clients, from individuals, to SMEs, to blue chip companies across the island, was looking to boost its operational performance through the use of technology. Given the industry’s fundamental reliance on data and documentation, a robust approach to digitization was necessary, to accelerate operations and enable real-time functioning.

The company needed to improve branch operations to better assist customers. As a practice, the majority of business decisions across its facilities are based on documents attached to the company’s information management system. Scanning of important documents for services offered to customers was therefore a crucial step in the entire chain of operations.

The Challenge

The leasing company serves more than 200,000 customers in Sri Lanka and offers solutions and services in insurance, micro-finance and credit facilities. Services such as those offered by the company necessitates maintaining a reliable and a secure archive of customer data. With multiple steps involved in the approval process for business services rendered by the organization, document scanning became a pivotal task in the following operations:

• Retrieving marketing files from branches for approval of credit facilities (leasing / loans)
• Scanning the security documents from the head office for the payment process of credit facilities
• Scanning all the documents from branches to enable archiving of all the mandates of fixed deposits and savings
• Application forms and other documents from branches for approval of insurance policies
• Bills with photographs of vehicles after repair for any insurance claim settlement process

With this context, streamlined access to data was required, to save costs on photocopying unnecessary documents, which in turn would increase business productivity. Additionally, the company required document scanners that could integrate seamlessly with the existing document archiving solution. An intelligent document capture solution was needed to augment an efficient customer experience. Furthermore, with several departments across the organization i.e., Fixed Deposits & Savings Department, Branch Coordination Department, Cooperative Management Department and Department Scanning Officers spread throughout the country, the company was faced with the challenge of implementing scanners that could accelerate the scanning process, to facilitate easy sharing of documents internally and allow minimum maintenance.

Solution

With an aim to expedite business operations and refine customer services, the company decided to implement a scanning mechanism that could merge effortlessly with the company’s document capture system. After thorough market research and a strong recommendation from DMS Software Solutions - a provider of Information Management Systems to the company, the management was confident that the Kodak i2400 scanner was best suited to fulfil the company’s requirements. In addition, two Kodak i3200 scanners were deployed for bulk scanning at the head office. Over a span of four years since these scanners from Kodak Alaris were deployed, the quality and user-friendliness of the products have proved to be a tangible resource for business operations. Furthermore, the company implemented the SceyeX A3 book scanner, which simplified scanning of binded documents, keeping in line with the requirements of the company’s legal department. Given the company’s future expansion plans and focus on consolidation of operations, they are certain that scanners from Kodak Alaris, are equipped to take on the dynamic workload and deliver impressing results.

Results

After deploying Kodak Alaris’ Information Management Solutions the following results were achieved:

• Documents related to a plethora of business processes; across approvals and payment processes of Credit Facilities, archiving of all documents related to fixed deposits and savings, approvals and claims of insurance policies, were now available at the click of a button and the dependence on paper based documents reduced significantly.
• The quality, durability, and speed of the scanners increased productivity by 90%. The State-of-the-art scanners from Kodak Alaris helped increase work efficiency and save the company the cost of photocopying unnecessary documents.
• Scanners from Kodak Alaris require minimum maintenance and this has allowed the company to reduce costs by a margin of 40% across all branches in the country.
• After using Kodak i2400 scanners for over four years, the company recently gravitated towards using the Kodak i3200 scanners. A separate scanning unit was created at the company’s head office where two i3200 scanners were deployed for bulk scanning, thereby doubling the business efficiency of back-end processes.
• The company is in the process of digitizing the complete business process at the head office by adding more departments and integrating them into the overall Information Management System. This will allow the organization to make use of scanned documents in the day-to-day functioning of the business, thereby reducing the time required to extract information and act on it; leading to quicker disbursement of claims and faster resolution of customer queries.