FIFGROUP has long been known as the pioneer in motorcycle financing in Indonesia. Established in Mei 1, 1989, the company changed its name from Mitrapusaka Artha Finance to PT Federal International Finance (FIF) in 1991.

“FIFGROUP strength is its presence all over Indonesia, including seven branches in Papua. The company has been rapidly expanding from just 20 branches in 1996 to now 169 branches and 390 point of services (POS),” says Indra Gunawan, Director of TI and Risk Management FIFGroup.

The management sees that financing company still has a big opportunity looking at the huge number of non-bankable population. And thanks to its broad network, the company could help with the issue.

IT as Business Enabler

Indra explains that in the beginning FIFGROUP engage in B2B model before moving to B2C. The change in the business model also changes the challenges the company has to face.

“Once a company go retail, the challenge is the service level, that’s what we are experiencing now. Form the customer side, the need fast approval assurance and delivery. While for the dealer side they demand fast payment,” explains Indra.

As an illustration, FIFGROUP deals with 4 million customer transactions a month and it keeps growing. IT becomes an important factor in FIFGROUP business process, thus the company continuously developing its IT system.

Going forward, FIFGROUP positioned IT as the company’s business driver and to take more roles in growing the business and expand customer service. To get there, the company needs to focus on stakeholder value of business investment, agile responses to a changing business environment, and managing business risks.

Challenge in Service Level & Governance

The need to improve service level and IT team productivity is behind FIFGROUP reason to implement IT Governance and IT Service Catalog. On the other side, the implementation of both is needed to comply with the Financial Service Authority regulation and Astra Group good corporate governance.

IT Governance is a bridging structure and process that leads and control IT process to support the company’s goal by optimizing IT resource and with a measured risk.

Meanwhile, IT Service Catalog is a structured document that acts as guidelines or important foundation for Service Level Management (SLM). The documentation process includes service objectives and service level monitoring, service procedure and how to access it, and the tools to evaluate service performance.

Previously, FIFGROUP used a centralized IT system that often causes trouble when dealing with changes, thus decreasing the IT division performance evaluation. The first step to deal with the problem leads to service level.

“We need to improve awareness to our internal user, one is that IT problem solving time match with the difficulty level. Aside being a performance indicator, service level also help us to catch productivity as expected by top level management,” says Indra.

MII, a Reliable Partner

FIFGROUP chose PT Mitra Integrasi Informatika (MII) as its partner when implementing IT Governance and IT Service Catalog. MII is seen as reliable with many success stories. Other reason is that FIFGROUP had previously partnered and uses IT solution from MII.

FIFGROUP has at least the criteria’s when deciding the implementation partner: first is good and proven track record, second is having experienced, competent and certified consultants, and the third are have done similar projects with satisfying results. “MII fills well with all the requirements,” adds Indra.

Knowledge gap between users was a challenging factor during the process. But all is well managed. Aside improving awareness, another important factor to the project success was management support.

Indra compliments how MII works. “We had a good communication and coordination with MII. With their help we are able to identify the gap and the target to obtain. From the process we also know that our IT maturity level is level 2, while we expect to be on level 3,” adds Indra.

After the IT Governance and Service Catalog are implemented, Indra hopes customer service could improve, especially in responding and solving user demand faster so it could accelerate the company’s business growth further.