Names and certain minor details have been changed to protect the privacy of the client whose automated Business Process Management solution is outlined here. Since this is a current project, the client has asked me to maintain privacy.

Alta West Capital had a problem: due to recent changes in legislation their practice as a private lender now fell under the purview of the Alberta Securities Commission as well as the Real Estate Council of Alberta. To further complicate matters this Calgary company also does business in B.C. and Saskatchewan, requiring compliance with the equivalents of the Alberta regulatory bodies in those provinces as well. The company’s compliance manual alone is over 200 pages. Certain critical errors in the investment setup and lending processes could result in the company having its license to deal in mortgages revoked.

In addition, the company was looking at implementing a remote working environment for many of its employees – allowing employees to do their jobs from virtually anywhere. This would allow for a smaller office resulting in substantial cost savings. It would also free management to work from remote locations as well.

The Geek Inc. team was brought in for an initial consultation with upper management and the Managers of the Investor Relations and Underwriting departments. Geek Inc. recommended the implementation of an automated Business Process Management solution using Bonita to lay the groundwork.

In addition to the goals already mentioned the company had a number of further requirements. First, that information which was being entered multiple times in as many as seventeen different documents for each investment would need to be entered only once, saving considerable time for each department. Second, that Bonita interface with the company’s mortgage finance control software, The Mortgage Office (TMO), to read and write information automatically between the Bonita interfaces and the existing TMO database and finally, that certain critical work be completed within a limited time frame as the Manager of Investor Relations would shortly be relocating to B.C.

As a result of the last requirement Investor Relations was chosen as the first department to have its functions controlled by Bonita. Geek Inc’s Business Analyst immediately began the interview process with the Manager of Investor Relations and her assistant. Within a matter of weeks the BPMN flowcharts had been completed for each of the possible combinations and permutations of an investment setup procedure, encompassing almost 200 different process paths.

While the Business Analyst prepared this documentation the programming team solved the problem of directly accessing The Mortgage Office database, a task in which they were ultimately successful but which required a high level of knowledge of database architecture and several weeks to solve.

It was also required that the programming team create online PDF forms for the many documents which investors were required to fill in when setting up a new investment or account. By creating PDF documents which could not only be filled online and as a result immediately read by Bonita and automatically entered to the TMO database the team greatly reduced the workload on the Investor Relations department.

With the completion of these pre-requisite tasks the programming team was now able to take the information supplied by the Business Analyst and create an automated Business Process Management solution which would meet the requirements outlined above. The final solution supplied the Investor Relations Manager with an interface which would allow her to immediately pull any investor’s information directly from the TMO database and auto-fill many fields in the required documents, or, in the case of a new investor, the IR Manager would be required only to enter some basic personal information which would create a new client file. Then, by selecting various options on the screen the IR Manager could instruct Bonita to automatically send to the investor all of the documents required for their specific investment setup, along with instructions, in an email.

The investor would then fill in these forms in the online PDFs and upon submitting them the entered information would be automatically added to the client’s TMO account. Bonita tracked the required documents to see that everything had been completed, as well as sending automated reminders to the investor at preset intervals to ensure that all documents were submitted in a timely manner. The IR Manager, through the Bonita interface, could check on the status of all open accounts at any time.

In addition, as investment requirements were met, Bonita automatically notified other employees in partnering departments, adding relevant pending tasks to their interface.

Once Investor Relations was complete the Geek Inc. team moved on to add other departments to the system, ultimately completing a unified automated Business Process Management system which encompassed all company functions by linking interdependent tasks across all departments to see that compliance requirements were almost impossible to violate while giving upper management an interface where they could see and control the progress of any given process at any time. The Investor Relations Manager was able to continue doing her job from her new home in B.C. and at the time of this writing the company is in the process of downsizing their office space.