Paul Scruby, registrations general manager at SAHL, says the company uses a workflow system to facilitate the mortgage process. "Whilst the workflow enables process management across our organisation, it lacks the ability to provide flexible, user-friendly performance analysis, particularly when the business processes are managed by our attorney partners," he explains.
 
Once a bond has been granted, attorneys are instructed to draw up the necessary legal documentation; it is this component of the process which falls outside of SA Home Loans' direct control, potentially resulting in unnecessary delays. "In an effort to improve customer service, we wanted the ability to better manage this process. We also wanted a tool that would measure the performance of the attorneys, which would allow us to recognise the better-performing legal offices," he explains.
 
The answer, he says, lay in Cognos 8 Business Intelligence, which was implemented by Synergy Computing on top of SAHL's workflow solution. The BI solution is also used by the attorneys themselves - and it gives them the ability to assess their performance against other firms on SAHL' panel.

"By providing our attorneys with the tools to allow them to measure and improve their own performance against the standards we have set, we expect the average turnaround time for processing a loan to decrease. We are therefore expecting our investment in Cognos 8 BI to yield a positive ROI," he explains.

Chris Hewitt, senior consultant at Synergy, says a proof of concept exercise demonstrated the ability of the Cognos toolset to deliver the required functionality. "Data is extracted from the workflow system and stored in a SQL Server data mart for analysis with the Cognos tools, by the attorneys over the Internet or by users at SAHL," he explains.
 
Since Cognos 8 BI is built on a Web services architecture, deployment to the attorney firms was a simple case of providing a URL and login details to each individual firm. This was complemented by a series of roadshows to ensure user familiarity with the system.
 
Using Cognos, Scruby says it is possible to drill down into the detail of current or historic data to analyse performance, right down to individual loans. "This information allows us to create objective metrics for service level agreements (SLA) with our attorneys. It also allows the attorney firms to identify and analyse any inefficiencies in their own processes, providing objective data to improve their processes" he explains.
 
Importantly, Scruby says Cognos is easy to use, displaying information visually in interactive dashboards, which allow users to drill down to explore anomalies and specific cases in more detail.

"It is very much like surfing the Web there is no need for technical knowledge. Starting from a high level view, the system allows tracking down to the level of individual staff and the time taken to perform their tasks. It allows identification of which cases or stages are causing problems, flagging those loans which are exceeding the SLA and notifying the appropriate individuals for rapid intervention," he concludes.