Document Indexing Improves Productivity for Mortgage Lender

Today, Jun 2005

Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corporation (TBW) is one of the nation's top 15 wholesale mortgage lenders. Founded in 1982, TBW provides loans representing nearly $10 billion annually, and has assets of more than $450 million. TBW's rise within the mortgage industry is the result of strong management and marketing teams, strategic partnership building, and technological innovations, including a state-of-the-art capture system.

TBW has been growing by 100% a year, providing a significant challenge to its document management operations. TBW's Ocala data entry center is processing 250,000 to 300,000 pages a day through nearly a dozen Kodak 3500 scanners, running two shifts six days a week. They also receive faxed documents via a Captaris RightFax Fax Server, as well as TIFF images of documents e-mailed in by nearly 1,000 agents nationwide, using handheld scanners with ScanSoft PaperPort software. Furthermore, PDF images, including credit reports and flood certification documents, are coming from its Website and TBW generates its own documents in-house using a print server. All in all, a loan could involve 190 different document types, and every one needs to be indexed for a DocuTreev document management system.

In 2000, TBW installed Datacap's Taskmaster capture software in its Ocala, Florida center and configured it to automate the indexing. When mail is sorted, documents are separated and each document receives a separator sheet with two bar codes - one with the loan number and the other stipulating document type. After scanning, Taskmaster recognizes the barcodes and assigns the proper document index value as it populates the DocuTreev system. Images are stored on a three terabyte SAN and a nine terabyte Plasmon optical jukebox. Later, images are burned to a DVD RAM.

As part of the export function to DocuTreev, TBW's capture designers added custom features aimed at facilitating communications between the loan partners. Working with VBScript, a series of e-mail notifications go out to agents and underwriters telling them the loan's location in the process. Now, when a customer calls to expedite their loan, they receive detailed and accurate information.

As mortgage applications continue to spiral upwards, in 2003, TBW determined that they'd need a way to relieve the pressure of the rising number of documents arriving in Ocala. With 12 regional offices, located in California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico and Oklahoma, TBW decided to push some responsibility to the regional offices.

Distributed Scanning and Indexing

By adding a Web component- Datacap Taskmaster Web - which enables remote scanning and indexing with a PC and browser, TBW realized its goal of an easy-to-administer decentralized scanning operation. Twelve regional offices are outfitted with Kodak 3500 scanners and connected to the Web server in Ocala. About 30% of loan documents are handled by the regional offices. Turnaround times are accelerated, because there's no shipping of documents, and since no data capture software is installed in the regional offices, administration of the nationwide network is remarkably simple.

Doug Bowman, TBWs VP of Research and Development, supervised the development of the system. "Its administration functions are useful, and the built-in reporting tools are very helpful. In one regional center alone, we are saving $30,000 a month in overnight mail costs."

"We pride ourselves on our ability to leverage technology to keep our products and services competitive, accurate and cost-effective," says Lee Farkas, CEO of TBW. "This has given us another tool to help us not only keep pace with the increasing demand, but raise customer service as well. We've built into the system unique features to enable us to track and expedite applications and facilitate communications between all the parties involved in a mortgage."