Shannex Announces Partnership with Canadian-based Blanc Labs to Improve Employee Experience and Resident Care
November 7, 2023
November 7, 2023 (Halifax, NS) – Through its membership with the Coordinated Accessible National (CAN) Health Network, Shannex, a family owned and operated organization providing seniors’ care, service and accommodation, is partnering with Canadian health care technology company, Blanc Labs, to deploy automated processes to improve employee transitions and reduce demands on operational, human resources, information technology, and business system teams. Shannex will work with Blanc Labs to deploy this solution across its 47 long term care and retirement living communities in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario.
Similar to many health care organizations in Canada, Shannex is experiencing an increased demand for health care workers and was in need of a solution to improve operational effectiveness to bring more employees on board in a more timely and efficient manner.
“Our team members are focused on providing care and service to residents in our communities and we’re always looking to find ways to improve the quality of our work,” said Greg Heard, Vice President, Innovation and Technology. “We are pleased to partner with Blanc Labs to deploy process automations that will improve operational efficiency, improve oversight and increase system security for employees, enabling them to have more time to spend with each resident.”
Blanc Labs’ automated solution will support an improved employee experience by helping to coordinate tasks between departments, track onboarding and offboarding activities and timelines, and manage access to necessary equipment and technology for new and existing employees.
“At Blanc Labs, we see a tremendous opportunity to improve employee experiences in health care through innovative uses of technology. It has been an absolute pleasure collaborating with the Shannex team to develop and implement a more efficient, secure and scalable approach to employee onboarding and management. We are excited about our continued partnership with Shannex and other health care organizations, focusing on delivering positive outcomes for stakeholders across the Canadian health care ecosystem,” said Rishi Khanna, Vice President, Engineering, Blanc Labs.
The project is being supported by the CAN Health Network – a federally funded national organization working to introduce more Canadian innovation into Canada’s health care system.
“The CAN Health Network is proud to support this important collaboration between Shannex and Blanc Labs. We look forward to seeing the results of the project, and the impact Blanc Labs’ solution has on patients, residents and staff across the country,” said Dr. Dante Morra, Chair, CAN Health Network.
“This announcement is great news for seniors in care and the dedicated people who work so hard to bring them the services they need,” said the Honourable Rechie Valdez, Minister of Small Business. “This partnership between Shannex and Blanc Labs is a great example of how the CAN Health Network is creating innovative solutions to strengthen our health care system while helping companies grow and create good jobs.”
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ABOUT SHANNEX
Shannex is a family owned and operated organization with a vision of Leading the Way to Better Living by providing seniors’ care, service and accommodation. Beginning in 1988 with a single nursing home, we now offer a full continuum of services for seniors through our Care at Home, Parkland Retirement Living, Faubourg du Mascaret and Shannex licensed long term care communities. Currently, we have communities in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Ontario, where approximately 5,900 employees provide care and service to more than 5,200 residents. For more information, visit www.shannex.com
ABOUT BLANC LABS
Blanc Labs works with organizations to deliver technology solutions that yield impactful outcomes for businesses, their customers and employees. As a UI Path implementation partner, Blanc Labs are experts at identifying and applying process improvement and using automation technologies to streamline workflows, reduce operational overhead, and scale efficiently. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Blanc Labs serves clients across the Americas through operations in Toronto, New York, Bogota, and Buenos Aires. For more information, visit www.blanclabs.com
ABOUT THE CAN HEALTH NETWORK
The CAN Health Network is a Canada-first approach to technology adoption. It helps break down barriers to scaling in the health care system and provides an environment for companies to scale to their full potential. Currently operating in Ontario, Western and Atlantic Canada, the CAN Health Network was recently awarded $30 million by the Government of Canada as part of Budget 2022 to expand into Quebec, the Territories and with Indigenous Communities. To learn more about the CAN Health Network, visit www.canhealthnetwork.ca
Low-Code Tools and Automation Power Minor Ailments Program for Pharmacists
November 3, 2023
Blanc Labs teamed up with Daylight Automation (acquired by Quadient) to enable the Minor Ailments service at a major Canadian pharmacy. The team designed and deployed digital forms, automated workflows, and integrated with enterprise systems to power how pharmacists assess and treat 15 minor ailments at pharmacies across the country. This comes at a critical inflection point for Canadians needing efficient access to healthcare services.
The client knew having pharmacists fill out a paper-form for each patient would not scale across their network and would create massive headaches for data integration, workflow management, payments & billing, and information security.
With Blanc Labs support, the Pharmacy rolled out a digital workflow solution that offers patients and pharmacists a much improved experience that eliminates extra steps, ensuring accurate and timely assessments, and treatment of minor ailments.
After 6-months of Minor Ailments Service in Ontario
244,630
Assessments Completed
250,150
Prescriptions for Minor Ailments
Benefits of our Solution Approach
Integrated Solution
The low-code solution offered an integrated approach for patient booking, patient record management, managing the assessment workflow, generating the prescription, and managing the billing process on behalf of pharmacists.
Streamlined Data Collection
Allowing busy pharmacists to spend less time on administration and more time on high-value tasks, ultimately allowing them to serve patients more effectively.
Improved Data Quality & Security
By offering a dedicated tool and workflow for each minor ailment, the solution dramatically reduced the amount of manual effort and the steps required to gather and transcribe patient data at the time of the assessment.
Additionally the solution is securely integrated into the pharmacy information systems, so the data collected conforms to all health data security standards.
Superior Customer and Employee Experience
Patients can now book an appointment ahead of time or walk-in any of the pharmacy locations minimizing the time between the consult and the treatment.
Rather than having each patient fill out paper forms, the tool guides the pharmacist through a Q&A style assessment and patient documentation workflow.
Real-Time Updates
Using a low-code tool allows the workflows to be updated in real-time. This means when any of the requirements of the 15 minor ailment assessment workflows change, the team can quickly update and push out the change.
As additional minor ailments are added, pharmacists will be able to conduct these assessments with minimal training or operational overhead.
Impact
85%
Of All Community Pharmacies are Prescribing for Minor Ailments
8
Provinces Currently Allow Pharmacists to Prescribe for Minor Ailments
$42M +
Savings to Ontario with Pharmacists Treating for 3 Minor Ailments
A Transformative Approach to Primary Care
Given that pharmacists are the most accessible health care professionals, I think minor ailments prescribing will lead to an improved pharmacist-patient relationship and a more fulfilling professional career. As medication experts, pharmacists are trained and equipped with the knowledge to practice beyond classic dispensing activities.
Providing clinical services, which allow pharmacists to use their entire range of training, is the future of pharmacy.
When it comes to minor ailments prescribing, passionate pharmacists will be invaluable and I’m hopeful that a shift will occur where these types of services become the norm1.
– Timothy Brady, Chair of Ontario Pharmacists Association
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Team Member Spotlight – Noel John, VP of Client Engagement and Delivery
October 30, 2023
Blanc Labs’ recently appointed Noel John as VP of Client Engagement and Delivery. We are thrilled that Noel has joined the team and brings with him a strong background in client engagement leadership.
Noel joins Blanc Labs from a fortune 500 publicly traded global technology and consulting company, where he spent close to 20 years on various leadership roles including leading a specialized QEA practice for Canadian BFSI customers. As a trusted partner for clients, he aids them in achieving their business objectives. His approach is rooted in the belief that true transformation requires active listening and a partnering approach through all phases of the journey.
Noel John
VP Client Engagement & Delivery, Blanc Labs
My focus is on building a One-Team culture in the customer-partner ecosystem, encouraging cross-functional cooperation, building high performance teams, and growth strategies that lead to driving successful outcomes.
5 Questions with Noel John
Get to know our amazing team members.
Q: Noel, you have an extensive background in client engagement and delivery, what do you think are the biggest drivers of success?
I have found that bringing a client centric approach to everything you do has proven to be a tried and trusted driver for success. You need to understand the client’s business, their future plans and the industry trends. You need to be their trusted partner to drive the required change.
Q: Technology is always evolving, and it seems like we are in a period of rapid acceleration. What technology trends are you watching closely and/or building capability to serve clients?
Artificial Intelligence has become de-facto topic in a huge number of client conversations. AI is not just a technological advancement but it’s poised to transform the whole business i.e it’s transforming how clients conduct their business.
We are still in the very early stages of this evolution but we now have all the ingredients like data, compute power, storage etc. Human creativity combined with the AI capabilities will unleash enormous opportunities for consumers and businesses.
These are some of the most exciting spaces to be working with clients because enabling this transformative technology will require a highly collaborative approach between business and technology teams, as well as partner support.
Q: What attracted you to Blanc Labs? Why did you decide to join this organization at this point in your career?
While I spent most of my career so far with large fortune 500 company, I was hungry to have new experiences, learn new skills and contribute along the way.
Blanc Labs provided this opportunity to run your portfolio like a start-up. I am looking forward to making a meaningful impact leveraging Blanc Labs’ entrepreneurial and innovative culture.
Q: Noel, thanks for the thoughtful responses. We are super excited to have you join the team and work with you. Last question, tell us something about yourself that folks in your professional network might not know about you.
I love to be outdoors during all four seasons, hiking in summer and skiing in winter.
I also own a motorcycle and love to take weekend trips to cruise the backroads of Ontario. This time of year is particularly special as you get to see the amazing fall colors on the trees. Safe motoring and see you on the road!
We developed an advanced healthcare interoperability application using GenAI and FHIR
Blanc Labs has spent the last five years working with healthcare companies like Reliq Health Technologies and Shannex as well as partners like Smile Digital Health and AWS, on building healthcare interoperability platforms and technologies on the latest standards such as FHIR and HL7.
Given the excitement around Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential to transform entire swaths of how we build and interact with technology, our healthcare team wanted to experiment with combining Gen AI tools with an FHIR standard to see if we could leverage it for a practical healthcare scenario.
As a result, our team developed a proof of concept that is meant to showcase the power of conversational AI tools to query an interoperable database of medical information.
For this PoC, we used OpenAI to query Health Samurai‘s FHIR platform, Aidbox.
Blanc Labs has spent the last five years working with healthcare companies like Reliq Health Technologies and Shannex as well as partners like Smile Digital Health and AWS, on building healthcare interoperability platforms and technologies on the latest standards such as FHIR and HL7.
Given the excitement around Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and their potential to transform entire swaths of how we build and interact with technology, our healthcare team wanted to experiment with combining Gen AI tools with an FHIR standard to see if we could leverage it for a practical healthcare scenario.
As a result, our team developed a proof of concept that is meant to showcase the power of conversational AI tools to query an interoperable database of medical information.
For this PoC, we used OpenAI to query Health Samurai‘s FHIR platform, Aidbox.
Why we did it
In our opinion, providing a conversational UI/UX to the end user will dramatically enhance the healthcare practitioner’s ability to access and act upon patient data on-demand instead of being limited by traditional web UI/UX.
The goal of building this prototype is to evaluate the strengths and weakness of Generative AI technologies to convert natural language instructions to corresponding FHIR API calls.
82%
of clinicians say that they do not always have a summary of the care their patients received outside of their practice setting¹
40 mins
is the additional time spent by clinicians per day searching for patient information from settings other than their clinical practice²
We built a prototype that allows healthcare practitioners to access any arbitrary patient data simply by asking questions in natural language.
To develop this prototype, we leveraged OpenAI’s GPT3.5 APIs as the foundational LLM to convert natural language to a FHIR query that would be run on Health Samurai’s Aidbox FHIR platform. We fine-tuned the standard GPT3.5 LLM model using prompt-engineering techniques to better understand healthcare-based user instructions and matched it with corresponding standard FHIR APIs to retrieve the required data. The model was also fine-tuned to output the data in a non-technical, natural language format.
While it is built on Health Samurai’s Aidbox with OpenAI APIs, this application can be customized for other FHIR providers and other Gen AI APIs without making major changes to the fundamentals to the application.
Examples of questions we can ask the AI–Powered Knowledge Assistant
What is the number of patients in the system?
Give me information about patient number XX*.
What’s the name of patient number XXZ?
Tell me about the last medical record of patient number YYT.
I want to know about the conditions that patient number XYZ is presenting.
*In a real-life scenario, XX would be replaced with the patient ID
Denis Zavyalov
Product Manager, Health Samurai
Blanc Labs has developed an innovative Proof of Concept that leverages Generative AI and our FHIR platform, Aidbox, to enable natural language access to patient data through FHIR APIs. We believe this could have
mainstream application around healthcare data accessibility leading to enhanced patient care.
Gen AI on 🔥 Techstack
Lessons Learned
Training is both Art, and Science
With this prototype, we have proven that quick and low-cost techniques like fine-tuning generic LLM models, refer Prompt Engineering techniques using OpenAI (e.g. GPT3.5) work in most cases in converting natural language to FHIR standards. This is a good alternative to the intensive and expensive approach of building foundational models from scratch or re-training existing LLMs for specific use-cases.
Since FHIR is an extensive standard, the process to fine-tune LLMs for every scenario would be time-consuming. Hence developers can start by focusing on their specific use-case rather than fine-tuning for all possible scenarios.
Conversational Queries Do Not Equal Structured Query Language
As we were fine-tuning the models using prompt engineering, we observed if the prompts were not detailed and precise, we would end up with ambiguous answers. In our attempt to make the UI easy to use by non-technical users who are not aware of FHIR standards, we spent a considerable amount of time in perfecting our prompt engineering techniques for specific use-cases.
This approach works well for a layman approach to asking questions to present information from the dataset, but it is interesting to consider how a “power user” ie. A clinician with a more informed understanding of what data they were looking for, as well as the taxonomy of the dataset they are querying could yield different outcomes for users.
One of the limitations of the GPT 3.5 LLM model was the limit of characters that can be returned. Some queries can’t be completed because their response would be larger than what is supported by the LLM model. For such scenarios, we would have to break a single prompt into multiple prompts. Their responses would need to be intelligently merged to provide a sensible output to the user.
Give Me the Data, But Make It Usable
Extracting raw data from a FHIR platform can be very useful, but often the data is one dimensional or very dense. There is a big opportunity around health informatics3 to present the data in various ways to make it easier to consume, more relevant or easier to pinpoint the “so what” of what is being presented.
Future improvements to the prototype’s functionality can be made by enhancing it to include responses in other data formats like tables and graphs to help users better visualize certain kinds of health data.
What’s next?
Our intention is to enhance the demo to support more complex queries involving more than one FHIR API call as well as supporting richer output formats like charts & tables.
We’d also like to hear from the FHIR community on their thoughts about how to take this to the next level. Please participate in the brief questionnaire below to provide you input and feedback.
What did you think of this initiative? Give us your feedback in the form below.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
How Reliq Health Built their Remote Patient Monitoring Platform Around FHIR
With the advent of cloud and better technologies, more organizations are moving to Software-as-service (SAAS) models to simplify their delivery process. As we get access to better tools and technology, it is less complex to achieve this delivery model. In this whitepaper, we will walk through the key architectural elements/design of deploying a Clinical Data Repository (FHIR repository) on the cloud in a multi-tenant format. We will look at how to isolate tenants within an EKS cluster, automate Tenant onboarding, and support routing of Tenant workloads. While Blanc Labs used AWS EKS (Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service) for this model, it is important to note that the same principle can be applied to any Kubernetes cluster.
The piece is intended for IT architects, developers and DevOps, who have practical experience architecting in the AWS Cloud with EKS/Kubernetes.
A major Canadian healthtech company that focuses on remote patient monitoring using innovative technology, was looking for the right partner to help them build a web-based SaaS application that could capture patient monitoring data via IoT devices and manual entries and store that data in a cloud based clinical repository. Blanc Labs was able to implement this solution with the Smile Digital Health clinical data repository on AWS HIPA compliant cloud infrastructure.
The result of our solution, detailed below, led to increased adaptability to interoperability standards, as well as an increase in market reach and sales.
Challenges Around Switching to an FHIR Compliant Clinical Repository
Installation
Installation of any FHIR repository itself is not a big challenge, and in most cases, FHIR repository vendors provide detailed documentation on how to install the repository. However, the complexities begin when there is customization required based on your multitenancy need. Do you want to install one repository for all your tenants, or should each Tenant have its own repository? Another important consideration is if the vendor is charging for repository installation and does the FHIR Repository support multi-tenancy by default.
Multi-tenancy
Multi-tenancy brings another level of complexity to the overall architecture. How can you onboard new tenants quickly? Does your cloud provider support multi- tenancy? Will each Tenant have its own cloud service or can it be shared in a secure way to reduce the overall cost of installation, operation, and maintenance?
Upgrade
Data repository vendors keep releasing new versions of the repository. It is important to keep upgrading your FHIR repository. This can be challenging if you don’t keep your FHIR repository up to date and decide to upgrade many years later.
Scalability
Some scalability issues have been solved by Kubernetes but replicating the infrastructure in a different geographical region continues to be the most challenging task. It is also important in the healthcare domain because some countries have different jurisdiction requirements on where to keep the clinical data. In this scenario, we must replicate the same infrastructure in the same geographical locations.
Building Multi-Tenancy Architecture
To systematically tackle the above-mentioned challenges, we can take a three- step approach:
Tenant Isolation Model
Routing traffic to tenants
Onboarding new tenants through automation
Tenant Isolation Model
There are multiple ways to solve multi-tenancy issues, each with its own pros & cons.¹
In the world of AWS EKS (Kubernetes) Tenant per namespace is a good blend of isolation and cost-efficiency. Tenant Isolation can be easily achieved through Network Policies. You can configure a Network Policy to allow traffic coming from a specific namespace only and deny all others.
The question arises, how will you place your FHIR repository? You have two options here:
Deploy individual FHIR repositories for each Tenant
Share the FHIR repository among all Tenants
This decision will be based on which FHIR Repository you choose and the cost efficiency you are aiming for.
Individual FHIR Repository for each Tenant
This approach gives you complete data isolation protection but comes with high operational costs. When using AWS, you end up with multiple DB instances for each FHIR repository if you decided to go with RDS (Amazon Relational Database). Along with Database and cloud services costs, there are other things you need to consider when choosing this approach. For example, how easy is installing the FHIR repository through automation scripts? Or, how much time will it take for each installation? Remember, our goal is to onboard a new Tenant quickly and automatically.
Shared FHIR Repository
Some clinical data repositories do provide multi-tenancy support but it’s important to look at it from an end-to-end context: how data will flow into the clinical repository, implications for data security, and other wrapper services or systems that will interact with clinical data.
If your FHIR repository supports multi-tenancy, then you can deploy on a shared name namespace and Tenant-specific services (wrapper services) will interact directly. In this approach, any traffic must come from Tenant wrapper services only. No direct external traffic is allowed to go to the shared repository.
The benefit of this approach is that when you bring in a new Tenant, you don’t need to install the FHIR repository from scratch. All you need is to deploy wrapper services for the new Tenant, which is comparatively easy using automation scripts.
Tenant isolation is not the only problem to solve in this architecture. How to route Traffic to tenants is another important question.
Routing Traffic to Tenants
The architecture diagram above illustrates how to route internet traffic to your pods. There are two approaches for routing traffic:
Using traefik Ingress controller (depicted in the above diagram)
Traefik is a cloud-native scalable ingress proxy. It can be used as a single point of entry to the cluster and it forwards the traffic to the corresponding backends. Here we can split the traffic based on subdomains, paths, headers and apply “middlewares” for transforming the incoming requests.
Routing Traffic Using AWS Load Balancer on EKS
AWS Load balancer is also an ingress controller. It creates corresponding AWS resources like AWS Application load balancer when you deploy this controller on your EKS cluster.²
Onboarding New Tenants Through Automation
To onboard a new Tenant successfully, you need a bunch of configuration/ resources up and running in the cloud and on your EKS cluster. Creating those configurations/resources manually takes a lot of time, and it’s nearly impossible if your sales team brings new tenants to the platform daily. Also, it adds risk to the production system, where you change configurations daily.
Hence, without automation, the effort of building the entire SAAS platform is lost.
Automation must be done in two layers:
Infrastructure
EKS/Kubernetes (on-boarding new tenants)
Infrastructure
The infrastructure-as-a-code concept is a lifesaver in this layer of automation. All large cloud providers support popular third-party platforms like Terraform, Ansible, chef, etc., to manage automated infrastructure. You can also achieve the same flexibility using native cloud solutions like AWS Cloud-formation or Azure Resource Manager.
Once you have scripts ready, you can easily replicate the infrastructure in different geographical locations whenever it is required. This layer helps you to achieve some degree of scalability.
In this layer, you end up creating cloud resources like VPCs, subnets, security groups, EKS, and other supporting resources like S3 (Storage), RDS, etc. Also, you need to set up some base resources on your EKS cluster like Istio, networking logging, and monitoring resources.
EKS / Kubernetes (On-boarding New Tenants)
Onboarding new tenants through a frictionless process is the key component of a multi-tenancy offering. The absence of this component defeats the purpose of SAAS offering if onboarding a Tenant takes a long time.
This process is a composite of multiple moving parts. Orchestration of these moving parts is required to get the Tenant up and running quickly. Through automation, we can achieve a low-friction process.
We can automate multiple subprocesses like creating new namespaces, configuring the Tenant Role & policies, and using Terraform, AWS CLI, and Bash Scripts. Each Tenant must access only those resources to which the Tenant is entitled. Cognito User pool, S3 buckets, SQS, DB schemas, and FHIR repository are a few examples.
Also, along with creating the above resources, scripts have to deploy wrapper & other supporting services if required.
These automation scripts give you the flexibility to build a Tenant Management app where the Tenant or Sales Team can onboard a new Tenant at the click of a button.
Key Learnings and Conclusion
At Blanc Labs we were successfully able to architect & deliver a Multi-Tenant SaaS solution to our healthcare client using the design provided in this whitepaper.
The biggest challenge we encountered in the process was the development of automation scripts whose complexity could increase considerably if not designed in the right fashion. We were able to modularize and document the scripts in a way that is easy to maintain for further enhancements. Automation scripts can also be configured in client’s CI/CD pipelines. This will allow clients to deploy new tenants and create secure & high available infrastructure with a click of a button.
As a new immigrant to Canada, fitting into the working culture was a concern. But the trust and support from managers and colleagues erased those worries. I’ve had the privilege of establishing a new practice and managing projects.
David Liu
CoE Lead
I feel at home at Blanc Labs. Here, I am encouraged to learn, grow, and pursue new levels of excellence every day. The leadership has been instrumental as they have nurtured me to rise to new heights and for that, I am grateful.
Pooja Bhandarkar
Software Engineer
The culture at Blanc Labs is built on respect, empowerment and teamwork. It is a great place to grow. You need to be a constant learner and a real team player to succeed. It’s always about helping each other to get the best possible result, not about who’s getting the credit.
Douglas Palacios
Staff Software Architect
Blanc Labs has been so empowering for me: the learning, the certifications, the opportunity to work with clients, the teamwork – my work family, really.
Nadia Bastidas
Sr Software Developer
As a new immigrant to Canada, fitting into the working culture was a concern. But the trust and support from managers and colleagues erased those worries. I’ve had the privilege of establishing a new practice and managing projects.
David Liu
CoE Lead
I feel at home at Blanc Labs. Here, I am encouraged to learn, grow, and pursue new levels of excellence every day. The leadership has been instrumental as they have nurtured me to rise to new heights and for that, I am grateful.
Pooja Bhandarkar
Software Engineer
The culture at Blanc Labs is built on respect, empowerment and teamwork. It is a great place to grow. You need to be a constant learner and a real team player to succeed. It’s always about helping each other to get the best possible result, not about who’s getting the credit.
Douglas Palacios
Staff Software Architect
Blanc Labs has been so empowering for me: the learning, the certifications, the opportunity to work with clients, the teamwork – my work family, really.
Nadia Bastidas
Sr Software Developer
As a new immigrant to Canada, fitting into the working culture was a concern. But the trust and support from managers and colleagues erased those worries. I’ve had the privilege of establishing a new practice and managing projects.
David Liu
CoE Lead
I feel at home at Blanc Labs. Here, I am encouraged to learn, grow, and pursue new levels of excellence every day. The leadership has been instrumental as they have nurtured me to rise to new heights and for that, I am grateful.
Pooja Bhandarkar
Software Engineer
The culture at Blanc Labs is built on respect, empowerment and teamwork. It is a great place to grow. You need to be a constant learner and a real team player to succeed. It’s always about helping each other to get the best possible result, not about who’s getting the credit.
Douglas Palacios
Staff Software Architect
Blanc Labs has been so empowering for me: the learning, the certifications, the opportunity to work with clients, the teamwork – my work family, really.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
How EQ Bank is Using Financial Data Integrations to Supercharge Their Residential Lending Process
Financial Services | Digital Banking | Integration | Residential Lending
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Summary
Equitable Bank is Canada’s seventh largest Schedule I bank and is ranked the number one Canadian Bank on the 2023 Forbes list of World’s Best Banks. Managing more than $50 billion in assets and serving more than 5 million Canadians, the bank offers a diverse suite of residential lending, commercial lending, and savings solutions, including high-interest savings products and guaranteed investment certificates.
As a challenger bank focused on delivering better banking experiences, Equitable Bank wanted to set a new standard for the mortgage application process that is fast, seamless and error free.
Working with Blanc Labs as a technology strategy and systems integration partner, EQ decided to implement Flinks Data Aggregation & Connectivity tools to transform their lending process by developing a new Statement Share tool.
The Statement Share tool overhauled EQ’s mortgage approval process, simplifying the identity and funds verification process for both customers and underwriters.
*Instant Bank Verification (IBV) and Financial Data Enrichment tools can accelerate the underwriting process by up to 30%*. Stats based on a sample size of Flinks’ clients
30%*Improvement in underwriting speed
Challenge
Deliver customers a modern and user-friendly digital mortgage journey, enhanced by digital automation.
Equip loan officers with a streamlined tool for effortless and precise income verification, leading to time savings and an improved employee experience.
Solution
Enable clients to conveniently share bank statements directly through a dedicated digital interface leveraging Flinks’ data connectivity.
Integrate Flinks with the bank’s mortgage origination engine for digitized, verified income and expense details, harnessing Blanc Labs’ integration expertise.
Impact
User-friendly tool that makes it easier for customers to share documents and account information.
Faster mortgage approval process and fraud mitigation by obtaining data directly from trusted bank sources.
Hours of manual work saved for loan officers.
The need for an improved mortgage approval journey
Buying a house is a major milestone for most people, often the biggest purchase they’ll ever make. The process involves various steps, including getting approved for a mortgage, which can be quite stressful on its own.
Financial institutions require a lot of data and documentation to move forward with their mortgage underwriting process. Unfortunately, this puts the burden on customers to gather and share all of that information.
The process of sharing documents is not a pleasant one. It involves downloading reports from bank portals, scanning or printing them, emailing them to the mortgage officer or handing in physical copies, and notifying the broker.
Paul von Martels
Vice President, EQ Bank
When clients send their bank statements directly to us by email, they’re sending them in PDF format—which requires manual work to process and to review for inconsistencies.
EQB had an additional layer of complexity. Their customers, most of whom are small business owners, have multiple bank accounts which were used for both business and personal purposes. This made the information sharing process even more confusing and cumbersome.
EQB wanted an elegant solution that would make the mortgage application process simpler for the customer and less complicated for the mortgage underwriters. The result was the Statement Share tool.
The Statement Share tool
Enhancing the Customer Experience
The Statement share tool uses Flinks’ data connectivity to provide customers witha digital interface where they can share their banking information securely and submit an application with just a few clicks. The tool sources information directly from banks, making the process reliable and error free. The tool also has the provision to notify the broker that the application is complete. Since introducing the tool, EQB has seen a significant uptick in its use by customers.
Improving Employee Productivity
Within the back office, the tool is a boon to mortgage underwriters who can easily verify the income and identity information. Blanc Labs integrated the Flinks API with the bank’s mortgage engine without having to rip or replace legacy components. This led to better employee productivity and experience.
Ashley Yantzi
Vice President of Residential Lending, EQ Bank
We use the Statement Share tool, created by Blanc Labs using Flinks APIs, at deal origination. There are various use cases for us, but the tool is a crucial part of our verification process that assesses whether what borrowers have stated in their applications is true. Thanks to the API, we are seeing statements and factual data directly from their banks.
In Conclusion
Equitable Bank’s Statement Share tool, powered by Flinks’ data connectivity and integrated by Blanc Labs, exemplifies the commitment to enhancing customer experience and optimizing employee efficiency. By streamlining the mortgage application process and reducing complexities, Equitable Bank has successfully evolved the way people navigate the path to homeownership, making it a smoother and more enjoyable journey for all parties involved.
If you are interested in evolving your financial ecosystem to improve your customer experience and employee productivity, reach out to us at Blanc Labs and let’s explore the possibilities together. Contact us today and start unlocking the potential of open APIs for your business.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Smart Document Management Solutions Accelerates the Launch of A Digital Direct Mortgage Offering for Questrade
Financial Services | Integrations | Services
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Defining the Opportunity
Questrade, Canada’s leading discount brokerage had an aggressive target date to launch and debut its residential mortgage product to originate loans through an in-house, proprietary Loan Origination System (LOS) . The LOS solution needed to collect loan application data and documents from the borrower and co-borrowers. The challenge was to buy or build the document automation layer of the solution in a short period of time.
Questrade partnered with Blanc Labs to leverage their experience as a technology partner with experience in building digital lending products.
A big goal of the digital direct mortgage offering was to automate as much of the document collection and document management function by offering a secure upload workflow for the borrowers and secure document storage for underwriters and internal team members. The solution also had to enable a seamless document viewing and proofing workflow for mortgage officers to define the loan conditions.
Ultimately, Questrade selected Blanc Labs’ for their expertise in the Canadian mortgage industry as a long-term partner which dramatically accelerated the timeline to design, build and launch the award-winning with Quest Mortgage platform in 2020 .
Challenge: Aggressive delivery target
Challenge: Limited internal resources
Approach and Solution
To deliver the requirements, Blanc Labs collaborated with the online brokerage’s stakeholders in two phases: Discovery and Design, and Solution Delivery and Integration.
Phase 1: Discovery and Design
During several agile design workshops, Blanc Labs’s multidisciplinary team of subject matter experts and specialists in user experience (UX), product, and engineering worked closely with the online brokerage’s senior executives and stakeholders representing both business and technology teams. The goal was to understand the requirements and imagine the total solution while keeping in mind the capabilities of Blanc Labs’s document automation product, Kapti.
Kapti is an automation software for document capture and processing. With Kapti, users can automate the document collection workflow through a web-based application and APIs. Kapti also uses proprietary machine learning (ML) technology to intelligently classify and split multi-page documents to extract, analyze, and deliver critical data from documents to generate decision-making insights. For more information, visit www.kapti.io.
The result was incorporating Kapti’s Application Programming Interface (API) and web-based user interface (UI) in the following arrangement:
Use Kapti headless as an API-first product to initiate document request flows
Use Kapti UI for document upload by borrowers and mortgage officers
Use Kapti UI for document proofing by mortgage officers
Integrate Kapti with the online brokerage’s Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to store uploaded documents
Integrate Kapti with the online brokerage’s enterprise virus software to scan each document for malware
Integrate Kapti with the online brokerage’s single-sign-on and identity manager for borrower and employee login
Deploy Kapti as a container on the online brokerage’s private GCP cloud (GKE: Google Kubernetes cluster)
Phase 2: Solution Delivery and Integration
Blanc Labs had a major advantage over other vendors and options: All the features and requirements listed during the discovery phase were part of Kapti’s out-of-the-box specification. This meant that the solution delivery didn’t need any development—Kapti just needed to be installed and configured to fulfill its duties.
During this phase, Blanc Labs worked on two streams of product and tech to deliver the solution. The Kapti product team worked closely with the online brokerage’s business and mortgage operations teams to configure the document types and user experience flows. In parallel, the Kapti engineering team worked with the online brokerage’s technology and infrastructure architecture teams to deploy the product and integrate it with the final state cloud solution ecosystem.
Blanc Labs had a major advantage over other vendors and options: Its product. Kapti, just needed to be installed and configured— extra development wasn’t necessary.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Equitable Bank (EQB) approached Blanc Labs to envision, build, and implement a highly complex commercial lending credit risk platform. Blanc Labs has been an integral part of EQB’s digital transformation journey. In this case study, we provide a brief overview of EQB’s digital transformation journey, share highlights from its recent work with Blanc Labs on a new commercial lending platform, and identify the key factors that have made the collaboration between Equitable Bank and Blanc Labs so successful.
Challenges
Equitable Bank is Canada’s challenger bank, ranked No 1 for two years running (2021-23) in the Forbes list of the World’s Best Banks. Since 2014, it has strategically focused on being a leader in digital banking, embracing an ambitious digital transformation agenda centered around its lending and deposit businesses. The bank knew that to survive and thrive in an increasingly digital world, it needed to get better control over its data and use innovative technologies more effectively to create value both inside the bank and for its brokers and end customers.
To digitally transform their operations, EQ Bank approached Blanc Labs to create a customized commercial lending credit risk platform for improving its data governance, underwriting and decisioning processes, and its client and employee experience.
Our Approach
Blanc Labs took an Agile approach to developing the bank’s commercial lending platform.
Concept to First Release
EQ Bank was determined to launch its commercial lending platform as quickly as possible. The bank and project team set a target to release Version 1 of the platform within 12 months, with the understanding that additional releases would follow to address gaps, improve functionality, and enhance the user experience.
To meet the tight timelines, the team designed and built the platform in parallel with additional discovery related to the requirements of the bank’s three commercial lending business units. The strategy was to ensure that the business line with highest volume and most standardized deals would be the primary focus on the first release, followed by the business line with small to medium sized deals on the second and finally the business line with deals representing low volume, high dollar value and more complex credit structures to be addressed in the third release. To expedite the entire process and drive more value, the team introduced feedback sessions with senior management to share design work visually and get immediate feedback. This process not only made feedback more efficient, but also helped align all stakeholders on prioritization.
The team completed the design and build work for Release 1 in mid-2019, conducted appropriate testing, and deployed the first release of the platform on schedule.
Darren Lorimer
Senior Vice President and Group Head, Commercial Banking at EQ Bank
What we have built with Blanc Labs as our partner, is a data-centric model which is unique in the Canadian marketplace. As we continue to optimize the build, we will realize many benefits over the years.
Building a Release Train
As confidence in the project rose, stakeholders became increasingly more involved and collaborative. At this point, employing a very efficient and disciplined release cycle was paramount. To make the release process more effective and efficient, the project team introduced the concept of a release train. This meant that the timing of each release was predefined, but the scope of each release was flexible and agile. When fully implemented, the release train resulted in high utilization of all team members and a more predictable cycle of activities and releases.
By November 2021, the bank had fully migrated all loans to the new platform and all lines of businesses were using the platform. This was a critical milestone for EQB as it meant the bank was now well positioned to begin reaping the rewards of the new platform with better data governance, enhanced risk management and a better employee and customer experience.
Establishing a foundation for future growth
With the platform now fully in use, new releases are expected to target niche lending scenarios and improvements to the user experience. Future releases will focus on shortening the end to end customer journey. The platform is expected to be fully mature by 2023.
Dan Broten
CTO, EQ Bank
The solution we created with Blanc Labs was an early adopter of our cloud-only, digital platform architecture. The platform approach provided capabilities for the team to incrementally build the solution using agile techniques while also providing consistent security and operational resilience.
Key Results
Blanc Labs was able to work closely with Equitable Bank to build a customized, data centric commercial lending platform that produces a consistent and accurate risk assessment leading to better decision making. Over time, the improved collection and accessibility of data will allow Equitable Bank to refine their risk rating models and further improve their risk management.
Stay ahead of the curve with our advanced solution engineering capabilities.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Mid-sized financial services institutions (FIs) are facing significant challenges during this period of rapid technological change, particularly with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). As customer expectations grow, smaller banks and lenders must stay competitive and responsive. Canada’s largest financial institutions are already advancing in AI, while many others remain in ‘observer’ mode, hesitant to invest and experiment. Yet, mid-sized FIs that adopt the right strategy have unique agility, allowing them to adapt swiftly and efficiently to technological disruptions—even more so than their larger counterparts.
Trez distributes capital based on very specific criteria. But with over 300 investments in their portfolio, they process numerous payment requests and deal with documents in varied data formats. They saw an opportunity to enhance efficiency, improve task management, and better utilize data insights for strategic decision-making.
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Blanc Labs Partners with TCG Process to Integrate their Automation and Orchestration Platform and deliver Advanced Intelligent Workflow Automation to Financial Institutions
Blanc Labs and TCG Process have partnered to transform lending operations with innovative automation solutions, using the DocProStar platform to enhance efficiency, compliance, and customer satisfaction in the Canadian lending market.
Banking and financial services are changing fast. Moving from old, paper methods to new, digital ones is key to staying in business. It’s important to think about how business process improvement (BPI) can help.
A business process improvement specialist identifies bottlenecks and inefficiencies in your workflows, allowing you to focus efforts on automating the right processes.
We’ve developed this resource to help technical teams adopt an Open Banking approach by explaining a high-level solution architecture that is organization agnostic.
Explore the transformative influence of large language models (LLMs) on document processing in this insightful article. Discover how these cutting-edge models are reshaping traditional approaches, unlocking new possibilities in data analysis, and revolutionizing the way we interact with information.
Technology | Digital Transformation | IT Management
Digital Transformation Vs. IT Modernization: What’s the Difference?
July 11, 2023
In today’s dynamic business landscape, organizations face numerous challenges such as economic volatility, supply chain complexities, evolving work styles, competing for talent, fickle consumer trends, market commoditization, sustainability concerns, and more. As stated in Forrester Research’s 2021 report, “In the 2020s, the one constant will be disruption.” CIOs play a crucial role in navigating these challenges and driving business transformation. The ability to embrace disruption will set leaders apart from laggards in this ever-changing landscape.
In this context, it is important for technology executives to make the choice between modernizing legacy processes or instituting a complete transformation of their systems. Yet, many organizations struggle to understand the difference.
In this article, we explore both digital transformation and modernization and why transformation is mission-critical for modern businesses.
Digital Transformation Vs. IT Modernization
Digital transformation has a broader scope and touches almost every facet of a business. IT modernization’s scope is limited to upgrading existing systems.
Don’t get us wrong. Modernizing your tech stack is just as critical to your business as transformation. The 2023 CEO Priorities survey shows that 51% of CEOs think low digital maturity/technical capabilities are barriers to creating business value with AI. As companies try to achieve digital maturity, they’ll go through multiple IT modernization iterations.
Let’s dig into the differences between digital transformation and IT modernization.
Digital Transformation in Practice
A digital transformation is meant to change or evolve some of the DNA of an organization such that a company is better equipped to compete in a constantly evolving environment where customer expectations are changing at breakneck speed. Technology can and should play a central role in a digital transformation but technology alone will not equip a company to operate effectively in this “new normal”, this requires a careful choreography of people, processes, and technology.
In addition to being better equipped to meet evolving customer needs and expectations, digital transformation can be your doorway to scaling your business by entering new markets, eliminating or minimizing process inefficiencies, and becoming more agile.
Domino’s is an excellent example of how digital transformation can change your company’s growth trajectory. Back in the day, the pizza chain was a brick-and-mortar restaurant that promised to deliver pizzas in under 30 minutes.
Competitors started offering a similar service. So Patrick Doyle, the CEO of Domino’s in 2011, decided to create an app that allowed customers to order pizza within seconds. Currently, Domino’s is testing delivery via autonomous vehicles to stay ahead of delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Essentially, digital transformation involves a fundamental shift in various business aspects, like internal processes and your business model. The goal is to achieve sustained growth and become a more competitive business.
Modernization in Practice
Modernization is often confused with digital transformation, but they are not the same. Modernization focuses on building on top of existing systems. For example, you could implement cloud computing and AI without changing legacy processes.
Suppose you’re a bank that is looking to improve its mortgage origination process. You currently require staff to enter customer details manually. Over the next quarter, you want to implement an automated loan origination system that eliminates almost all the mundane tasks in the origination process.
For this, you’ll use technologies like AI, natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition (OCR), and robotic process automation (RPA) through third-party integration or by building a new solution. These technologies will enable you to automate tasks like document processing and customer onboarding.
These technologies can help you re-engineer the origination process to make it more efficient—without disturbing your underlying mortgage process or the business model.
Why Digital Transformation Matters
Digital transformation is right for you if you’re in a rapidly evolving market and want to stay ahead of the competition.
Since digital transformation involves a more comprehensive change in your business’s model and operational processes, it can be resource and time-intensive, especially in the absence of first-hand experience on the multi-faceted nature of transforming an organization. Let’s go back to our mortgage example to understand the difference between transformation and modernization. Consider if the mortgage lender wanted to move from being a traditional, broker-based lender to a digital direct lender and the relative time, cost and complexity required to stand up a whole new business model.
IT modernization is relatively less resource and time-intensive. Modernization is an excellent place to start if you’re struggling to meet customer expectations or efficiency targets because of outdated technology.
Revamping your technological systems will help you reduce costs, operate more efficiently, and scale your business.
Digital transformation matters to two types of businesses:
Businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve by implementing the latest technologies in a fast-evolving market.
Businesses that need to survive in a market where other businesses failed to implement new technologies on time.
Digital transformation isn’t easy for either of these businesses to implement without an experienced team—only about 30% of companies navigate digital transformation successfully.
However, once you’ve successfully completed digital transformation, your business stands to benefit on multiple fronts.
The pandemic caused the most recent surge in digital transformation. Businesses were forced to adapt to an environment where employees prefer remote or hybrid work models, but they benefited greatly from the changes that followed.
That’s exactly why more businesses are excited about digital transformation. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, the combined value of digital transformation to society and industry will exceed $100 trillion by 2025.
Here are some benefits of digital transformation that highlight why it can be a game changer for your business this year:
Improves Customer Experience
Customer expectations have risen significantly over the past decade. They prefer businesses that offer a great experience in all customer-facing aspects.
Enable Data-Driven Decision Making
Data analytics is one of the most critical capabilities you gain from digital transformation. With modern tech, it is typically much easier to securely access and manipulate data that can be used to unlock valuable insights about customers, competitors, and internal processes.
Better Resource Management
Digitally-powered businesses use hundreds of apps and store data in multiple places. The lack of interoperability and data silos can make business hard. Digital transformation involves integrating these digital tools, allowing you to consolidate dispersed data sets and apps.
Improves Team Collaboration
Adding the right digital collaboration tools to your toolkit can be critical to building a collaborative environment in the workplace. They allow teams to collaborate outside the office space or country. If your team is spread across time zones, you can use async communication tools for better collaboration.
Increases Scalability
Digital transformation gives you the flexibility to grow faster. It can help reduce time to market and make product or service improvements faster. You can also serve clients in a larger geographic area and communicate with your clientele more effectively.
What Does it Take to Create Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation needs more than just technical expertise. It’s a massive undertaking where multiple factors contribute to your success.
Here are things to focus on when transforming your business digitally:
Digital First Culture
Transforming your business requires agility and an attitude to pursue the latest technologies proactively. Building a digital-first culture, where employees proactively look for opportunities to use digital solutions to help the business achieve its goals, is critical to successfully transforming your business.
Culture is a critical part of Gartner’s ContinuousNEXT approach to digital transformation. The Gartner experts who coined the term cite culture as a major barrier — 46% of CIOs identify culture as the most significant barrier to digital transformation.
A report by MIT and Capgemini explains that focusing on the following seven cultural attributes can be vital to building a digital-first culture:
Innovation: The prevalence of behaviors that support taking risks, thinking disruptively, and exploring new ideas.
Digital-first mindset: A mindset where everyone, by default, thinks of digital solutions first.
Customer-centricity: The use of digital tools to improve customer experience, expand the customer base, and co-create new products.
Open culture: The extent of partnership with third parties, including vendors and customers.
Agility and flexibility: Decision-making speed, dynamism, and your company’s ability to adapt to evolving market demands and technologies.
Data-driven decision-making: The use of data to make better decisions.
Collaboration: The strategic creation of teams to make the best use of the company’s human resources.
Change Management
Often, the most overlooked aspect of a digital transformation is the amount of change management and capability development required to enable team members to excel in their new or evolved roles. One takeaway that we’ve learned from our experience is the need to have a strong leadership commitment and a high level of conviction and alignment across the senior leadership team on the transformation objectives, priorities, and plan to undertake the transformation effort at an organization. .
When communicating a change, remember that the benefits of change may be evident to you. Yet, your team might see change as a signal to step out of a workflow they’re comfortable with and learn new skills.
Resistance will snowball when one employee who feels that way communicates with colleagues. Change management can help prevent or at least minimize this resistance to change.
Here are three critical elements of managing change:
Plan before you start: Change management should start before digital transformation. Risk analysis and assessing the organization’s readiness are great ways to lay the foundation for your change management strategy. They involve identifying organizational attributes like culture and characteristics of change.
Change management: This is where you go from planning to execution. You keep communicating your digital transformation plans, address concerns regarding the plan, and train employees.
Feedback: Change management doesn’t end after executing your change management strategy. Seek feedback from employees about the change. If you see reluctance, take corrective actions to ensure resistance doesn’t snowball.
Data-Driven Organization
Digital transformation is highly data-driven. Managing data — storing and processing data and ensuring data integrity — are one of the first things you’ll need to work on when you start the digital transformation process.
Data provides a unique insight into your operations. Once you’ve achieved a higher level of operational transparency and gained a deeper understanding of core business processes using data, you’ll be able to identify barriers to digital transformation. Data will also enable you to improve and optimize your transformation strategy continuously.
Companies like Airbnb and Amazon hold massive volumes of data. These companies are great examples of data-driven organizations. This data allows them to personalize customer experiences and stay one step ahead of the competition.
Emphasis on Quality
When you’re adamant about delivering quality, you’ll need to ask yourself — is the business prepared to ensure a high level of quality during the digital transformation journey?
Going all in at once is a bad idea. Digital transformation requires an incremental approach where you plan, test, and validate ideas every step of the way. This will allow you to stay prepared for potential pitfalls and optimize your strategy as you go. You’ll avoid complete disasters, which can result in loss of money, trust, and reputation.
Taking an incremental approach makes your digital transformation journey smoother and ensures you maintain high quality throughout the transformation process.
Begin Your Digital Transformation Journey
Digital transformation can be challenging to navigate without an experienced partner.
At Blanc Labs, we understand each organization has unique needs. We offer advisory and consulting services to gain a complete understanding of your most pressing challenges and help you start your digital transformation journey.
Book a discovery call with us today to learn more.