MOLINE, Ill. — If time really is money, then IH Mississippi Valley CU had a lot to lose when paper documents were missing in action.
"We were losing time looking for paper, and losing paper because they were couriered from place to place," said IH Mississippi Valley Credit Union's Enterprise Applications Manager Ben Abbott.
The credit union knew it was time to move ever closer to the much-vaunted "paperless office," eliminating hard copy paper-based documents in favor of automated processes that streamline all sorts of operations, including loans.
During a Fiserv conference, Abbott and his team came across IMM, which offers e-signature capture, business process automation and document presentment solutions. After the meeting, IMM followed up with onsite product demonstrations.
"Since every credit union, regardless of size, faces similar challenges regarding operational efficiency, compliance and productivity, we designed the solution from a pricing model to an implementation model for all size credit unions," said IMM's Vice President of Markets and Strategy, Mike Ball. "The solution is most definitely scalable and performs quite well in larger, more demanding environments just as it does in the smaller operating environment."
IH Mississippi Valley CU's discovery process also included talking with IMM's 600-plus financial institution clients. "We found a similar credit union to ours operationally and visited that credit union to see it in use as well as to ask them questions," said Abbott.
The $895 million credit union, supporting 110,000 members in 15 branch locations, opted for IMM's TotaleAtlas and Document Exchange. Ball explained that the e-signature platform provides in-person and remote signing capabilities that are managed by rules-based workflow automation technology.
"These operate on dedicated virtual servers that are installed and maintained within the safety of the credit union's data center and firewall protection," said Ball who added that depending on scope, the solution can be fully implemented between 60 and 90 days.
Adoption and Roll Out
IH Mississippi Valley CU adopted the solution in August 2013 and went through three phases of beta testing to complete the process, noted Abbott. The first step was launching TotaleAtlas on the CU's loan operating system, CRIF SAIL, which transpired last December. This past April TotaleAtlas Workflow went live on its account processing platform, Fiserv Spectrum.
"Beta testing and training were a large part of our rollouts for each phase. For both rollouts, we had multiple training sessions, both onsite and remote, where we set up a demonstration of the products and then also had a lab set up where all users could go and experience how the systems will function on a test environment," said Abbott.
He added, "We then used one branch of ours as a beta for two weeks prior to all other branches going live. Then over the course of two weeks in December we went live with all of our branches with a subject matter expert on site for each rollout."
From a technology perspective, two servers were required post-rollout — one for the application and one for the database. Since there was a live and test environment initially, the number of servers required was four. Additionally, all machines that used the products needed software installs.
"The additional hardware we needed were the iPads to use as signature collection devices," said Abbott. "We were already in the process of installing redundant wireless access points at each location, but planned it in conjunction with this project's needs."
Team Work
With a 15-person IT department, a knowledgeable project team was formed to work with the vendor on transitioning. This required sending two team members to a three-day training course to better learn how to create and design documents. "On the IT end, IMM did a lot of the configurations themselves and just needed to establish a connection with someone in IT," said Abbott.
A project of this size is cumbersome and requires certain employees to carry heavier loads. Tasks were distributed to respective and capable team members. For example, the application administrator and server administrator were charged with configuring the back end of the applications on the server and account processing systems.
For the designing of workflows, a team of four employees spent approximately eight hours per week over the course of one month designing 30-plus workflows. Additionally, two business analysts oversaw the project from inception to completion.
"They were mainly spending time configuring the new documents to be electronic, designing the end-user interface on Branch Suite — Spectrum end-user interface — and tweaking the workflows during and after testing," said Abbott.
Paper Pushing Is A Time Sink
Since the platform is newly rolled out, Abbott couldn't provide concrete statistics on related benefits. The best ROI, he noted, has been member feedback.
"We have been able to provide a very flexible environment for members to complete our lending process remotely or even in a blended environment where parties sign in different locations or even one remote and one on site," said Abbott.
One member told him: "My son is in the hospital, and I can't make it into a branch to sign loan documents. You have just made my day that I can sign loan documents from my phone." Another member related: "I am a daycare provider, and it is hard to come into a branch to sign loan documents with several children, and now I can sign documents from my own home. That is fantastic."
The CU's e-branch and contact center have also experienced productivity and efficiency improvements, explained Abbott. For example, they now can complete a loan or document with a member on the phone with e-mail. Prior to the solution, documents were either sent through snail mail or members had to visit branch locations.
"In just the ability to sign remotely versus having to mail documents, the process improves from days to minutes," said Abbott. He added that imaging/archiving documents is also an automated process, which means the documents that go through TotaleAtlas do not require scanning and indexing by an employee.
"This means the document is now searchable in our imaging system within minutes of the transaction, compared to days or weeks depending on the time and method they were archived in the past," said Abbott.
When asked what lesson he learned during the process, Abbott said it is imperative to prepare and educate the whole organization for workflow transitions and to know if all paper documents will function equally when transmitted electronically.
"We ended up not only modifying documents, but in asking ourselves questions about the documents, the processes were changed in how they were handled, as well, by really taking a hard look at how they were handled," said Abbott.
