Hexaware Technologies's: Systematically Capturing Crowd SOURCED Ideas WITH PROJECT ‘Brainbox’

Ideas might have a high mortality rate everywhere, but not at Hexaware, thanks to this project, which has helped 200 project ideas see the light of the day, 2500 man-months of efforts saved, and much more

Founded in 1990, Hexaware Technologies is a multinational company that offers consulting services, IT and BPO. The company recorded a revenue of $ 485.5 Million. It provides solutions and services to various verticals like Banking, Financial Services, Capital Market, Healthcare, Insurance, Travel, Transportation, Logistics, Manufacturing & Consumer.

The Challenge

If you ask for ideas in a company, chances are you’ll get bombarded with lots of them, and some of them will be really good. The challenge usually is in making sure they’re captured properly and acted upon. This was the same problem being faced at Hexaware. There were lots of ideas, but no way to really capture them and put them to effective use.

The Solution

The internal systems head of Hexaware, Saravanan Vishwanathan (more popularly known as Sarva), came up with the idea of capturing all ideas. Thus was born Brainbox--a portal cum application with built-in analytics. The solution has numerous state of the art features like a responsive application to capture new ideas from various employees, a workflow to classify and route them for multi level approvals and a follow up process to track their overall progress, and the benefits realized from them.

To ensure a healthy discussion and feedback for each idea given, Sarva also integrated Yammer into Brainbox. As a result, people can now see how many people like their idea and get direct feedback. The solution is deployed for various project teams who could reuse ideas from other projects.

The Result

The benefits are tremendous. For e.g. in one year over 800 ideas were captured and 200+ implemented and tracked. Over 2500 man-months of efforts were saved in various projects and for customers and finally, multi million direct cost benefits were realized through this solution.

Besides Brainbox, Sarva continues to manage the company’s internal business applications, and leads the company’s Microsoft Dynamics practice.

An alumunus of Alagappa University a successful project like Brainbox can’t happen without good project management skills and exposure to a wide array of enterprise applications and technologies. Sarva has plenty of it, having served eleven years as senior project manager at Ramco prior to Hexaware, and with Blue Star before that, where worked on sales and service management.