About The Customer

The Housing and Development Board (HDB), a statutory board of the Ministry of National Development, plans and develops affordable, quality public housing and related facilities. It was set up in February 1960 to take over the work of the Singapore Improvement Trust set up by the British Colonial Government from 1927 to 1959. Today, about 85 percent of Singaporeans live in HDB flats compared with only nine percent in 1960 when HDB was first established.

The government supports the public housing program by providing financial assistance for the funding of housing development and other activities. Assistance is in the form of loans such as the housing development loan that covers development programs and operations, and government grants.

HDB has always planned and built comprehensive town structures even back in the 1960s when it faced great pressure to deliver large numbers of flats.

HDB, in order to provide a range of services to the public, has invested wisely on the technology. It has a wider range of platforms, applications, databases, etc. HDB provides excellent e-services to the customers viz. online application forms, enquiries about flats availability, house grants, scheduled sales, resale transactions, etc.

Challenges Faced By HDB

Key challenges faced by HDB were:

• Complex workflow and approval process (lengthy as well)
  
• Abundant papers / forms management
  
• Customer Relationship uniformity / standardization
  
• Integration to the legacy system (M/F)
  
• Multiple branches operation
  
• Dynamic process changes (for improvement or new business)
  
• Process tracking / measurement

• Receiving of the form (be it through fax, Internet or MICR form),
  
• Approval and qualifying process (which will take several interactions with the buyers and sellers physically),
  
• The document & supporting document completion
  
• Internal borrowing, KIV, returning, scheduling / booking, document splitting / detaching, etc
  
• Special case handling
  
• Correspondence with the end users
  
• Issuing letters / notifications for various conditions / situations until they closed the case, is truly a challenge.

• Miss-handling case
  
• Missing documents
  
• Delay and miss scheduling
  
• Non standard action from officers
  
• Inefficiency & redundant work
  
• Non track able process
  bottom line is: Customer dissatisfaction.

• eRegistry: this is the main module that will handle the document workflow process (it uses BarCode to help tracking the physical document). The workflow is not only for the buying and selling process, but it also govern the internal process of borrowing, KIV, reminder, booking, document detaching, tracking, searching etc. This system also integrates with the legacy system which is running in the M/F (OS/390) system.
  
• Standard Letter: this module is used to standardize (template) and automate the entire reply or notification letter from HDB to the end user. It is integrated with the eRegistry system.
  
• Customer Feedback: this module is used to handle the feedback that come form the users (ie. phone call, email, fax, snail mail) and provide the standard action / reply. It is integrated with the standard letter module and various back end system (eg. call center).

The solutions so far have been used in several departments (with some modification / enhancement and customization). It has also won several internal HDB award / contest for productivity improvement program.

The system specs: Lotus note domino front end with DB2 / UDB V6 back end / data base. Integrates to OS/390 - M/F using the 3270 screen scraping method.

Challenges Faced By Singalab's Team

The main challenge was the complexity of the workflow. The very unique and specific process in HDB was really a big challenge. Some time it was unavoidable to say to the customer that what they want is really technically impossible - means we have to find another way to do or work around or reengineer the process.

The number of documents to process was another challenge and also the number of standard letters for every situations or conditions was beyond our imagination when we started or estimated the project.

At the end, it was really a satisfaction for us to be able to make a successful deployed system which has been used for more than 5 years now (the first version), ore over the system has won several award for its proven productivity tools!