Cognizant's 2021 AWARD FINALIST CASE STUDY: Best Achievement in a Business Process Management Program

Most Outstanding Digital Transformation Workplace Program

As pandemic hit in 2020, Cognizant’s Digital Business Operations associates supporting global clients dispersed across locations and business as usual service delivery got disrupted in a very short period. Thousands of Cognizant staff supporting mission critical industries moved toward a remote-working/work-from-home (WFH) operating model.

Lack of visibility into key performance indicators and work patterns hampered remote delivery. Obtaining real time insights into Business Process Management (BPM) to influence and deliver on transformation pipeline became difficult. In an organization wide strategic review, it was clear, that remote operations were going to impact our ability to deliver on our clients’ contractual obligations and our strategic objectives of driving bottom line enhancement and customer experience.

To achieve our strategic commitments, we embarked on a digital transformation roadmap to address these challenges via –

• Seamless deployment leveraging agile technology architecture:
Equipping operations with cloud enabled digital solutions for enhanced business process management and generating visibility into work patterns of distributed operations staff. Projects were prioritized based on criticality and regions. Business unit aligned program change agents drove BU adoption plans and ensured seamless change via point in time relevant, persona-based communication across organization in partnership with HR.

• Shaper operational excellence through data led analytics and insights:
Drive operational excellence in the new normal to deliver outcomes and accelerate our digital transformation pipeline via advanced analytics. Insights generated from enabled associates/projects across dimensions of availability, ability, variability, and engagement helped drive dynamic capacity management in a hybrid work environment. Re-baselining and gamification were additionally leveraged to drive a selfimprovement culture. These were additionally augmented with parallel efforts in driving efficiency via intelligent automation and visualization to provide leadership with the ability to compare critical operational benchmarks across global organization.

• Sustaining the gains through operational rigor and people focus:
Leveraged human centric approach to institutionalize organizational learnings, best practices for a lasting change making operational excellence future proof in hybrid operating model. Independent and neutral third party led internal review of usage of aggregated data along with governance and practices followed was conducted to ensure adherence to organization wide compliance policies and strengthen the control framework. Sentiment analysis through people surveys helped understand the pulse of change delivered and address concerns if any to further streamline business process management.

Robust, flexible and scalable operating model:
The results of our efforts in combining remote work enablement and operational excellence helped us to ensure business continuity for over 17,000 associates till date, generate insights to transform BPM achieving capacity saves of 1.3 million hours.