Read this article about Cognizant Technology Solutions, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Operational Excellence to deliver Digital Transformation, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

Reimagine the Intake Process with Cognizant’s Smart Intake COE

At Cognizant, the focus of operational excellence goes beyond the traditional event based model of improvement towards a long term change in our clients’ ways of doing business. Our solutions are innovative and combine both technology and domain expertise thus addressing the key industry and business challenges of our clients. One of Cognizant’s key focus areas has been Digital Transformation. In its pursuit to unlock Digital Capabilities, Cognizant launched the Smart Intake COE in 2018.

Cognizant aspires to be the amongst the Top 3 leaders in Intake Solutions by 2020 through this initiative which focusses on driving digitization at source. Smart Intake COE’s mission is to significantly reduce manual efforts through automation by converting all kinds of data and documents into machine-readable formats with help of type/hand-written recognition, machine learning, image enhancement, language translation & AI tools, thereby solve for intake challenges faced by different practices in order to deliver significant savings for the business.

Scope :

The services industry has had only limited success in fully leveraging RPA Automation and Analytics in the downstream scope because of the intake challenges such as image enhancement, handwriting recognition and language translation faced by different practices.

Cognizant Digital Operations receives a wide spectrum of inputs such as unstructured, structured, standard & non-standard documents and compatibility of existing workflow to the Intake tools still holds a challenge that the initiative focusses to solve for quickly. Each vertical and account within Cognizant Digital Operations experiences this problem and hence the Smart Intake efforts are kept Vertical agnostic and encompasses all Service Lines depending on the various types of input available.

Key Challenges:

• Non-standard input formats from heterogeneous sources makes meaningfully combining data difficult
• Some of the content in forms continues to be in handwritten format
• Poor image quality due to lower scanning resolution with noise and blurring resulting in very low accuracy of digitization
• Documents in various languages need to be translated into English for regulatory filing and other purposes
• Humungous amount of textual and medical data to be interpreted in the protocol

2018 Key Outcomes

• Comprehensive analyses of Intake opportunities across all BU’s/Major Accounts completed; Detailed functional assessments through sample evaluations, VSM reviews and process walk through done
• Form-type based analysis completed for top 27 Forms; Identified top 10 Forms with an annual volume of 30 Mn; Solutioning for scalable deployment in progress
• Early focus and adoption of Intake reimagine, augmented with technology solutions including iDCS deployment, DAF enhancements etc. led to over achievement of the annual Intake FTE targets
• Intake Assets: 11 Assets built ; 8 In Production ; 3 WIP and would be ready by Q1-2019
• Connect with Markets & Consulting teams established; RFP Support commenced from Q4-2018, Intake Consulting planned from Q1-19