This project required industrial-strength production workflow capability to improve transaction turnaround time for high volumes of incoming faxed automobile loan applications. It gives a strategic advantage to the bank who implemented it because in the competitive market of automobile lending faster loan approvals lead to more market share. Minutes make a difference when a prepared buyer is at the car dealership waiting to sign.
Faxed documents are captured upon receipt and immediately sent as online images to a Quality Control operator who validates the quality of the image and completeness of required written data on the application. The Quality Control operator can also sort, discard or re-route fax images as necessary. Qualified applications are immediately routed to Data Entry operators who view the images alongside a mainframe data entry window on the "virtual desktop" of their large format monitors. As Data Entry operators work, a stealth Windows program grabs key field values as they are entered into the mainframe and gets double-duty from them: they are simultaneously sent to the document imaging system where they serve as the index fields for the loan application document. This process creates a permanent link that is used to tie all subsequent document images for the loan together with its associated mainframe data. The resulting paperless loan folders will often be active and growing for years, and the stage has been set for all of the benefits of document imaging through the lifecycle of the loan.
The actual implementation includes a few pieces which do not appear on the diagram above: a fax broker, an image format conversion server, a relational database server, and a redundant image cache for contingency recovery.