Loan Application Review
Continuing our series on Digital Business Automation and how we can help make a business more efficient and effective, I’m going providing a few articles about a project our team recently put together. This was a proof of concept (POC) project in the loan industry. As we move through this series, I will highlight some finer details of features and design. This particular project was completed using IBM Business Process Management (BPM) and Operational Decision Manager (ODM), along with some external API integration. This video focuses on the mortgage industry; however, we’ve used the tools and methods described here to successfully implement solutions in the financial, manufacturing, retail, medical and many other varied business sectors.
IBM BPM makes it easy for you and your team to find the work that needs to get done. It gives you one place to find your to-do items, to see where work is within the process, to research previous work data, and to get reports on performance and efficiency. If you’ve been getting by using email or a simple ticketing system, you’ll find the introduction of BPM for your process management truly transformative.
In this video we continue the work started in the previous blog post, checking to see why a particular loan underwriting request was put into a status of “deferred.” In the web-program we open the loan underwriting request and can see status updates at the top of the page in a collapsible section. Below that section, we can make edits to the application to resolve any reported issues.
In this case, the problem was caused by the loan amount requested below the threshold required by the business rules for the underwriter. From this same page we can bump up the requested amount sufficiently to get past this hurdle.
Business rules and logical constraints are automatically enforced. Well thought out user interfaces (UI) enables quick resolution of work challenges without lots of page loads. The point of digital business automation is to empower workers to do their jobs more effectively, and our consultants always prioritize this during design and development.
When the loan applications are submitted for underwriting, they are evaluated by a set of business rules which are housed in our ODM system. In a later video we’ll look at how that is managed, but briefly I’ll mention that in addition to being a powerful rules engine which helps automate these kinds of rules-driven decisions it is also empowers business owners to be able to manage, test and edit the rules themselves without requiring a huge development project when requirements change. Offloading those decisions helps free up the cognitive power and time of your team for more novel and demanding kinds of work.
Apex Process Consultants uses Agile development methodologies so when we build solutions, the business users are constantly involved in the process of creating new systems and processes. We deliver progress updates through regular playbacks for the business owners so that everyone can see how the solution is being implemented. It’s an open and collaborative effort. In our next video (and corresponding blog post) we’ll be looking at the Underwriter’s view of the submitted loan applications.
If you’d like to learn how Apex can help your company get a Digital Business Automation makeover, please contact us by email (info@apexbpm.com) or phone (947) 282–6026.
