The post-closing industry is riddled with countless paperwork, uncertain delivery times and processes that rely on manual functioning. You can never truly forecast the amount of volume you will receive on any given day. We all can understand the cyclical cycles, month ends, mid-month closings, Friday dumps, etc. Your customers may be able to give you some estimation, but the ability to be precise had been elusive for years. With such unpredictable volumes from our clients, it made it difficult to integrate the order opening part of the process. Because sometimes it is not the client who is the delay, but it could be the borrower, notary, or even the overnight couriers.
Delays in the manual route
The manual route is a laborious process and involves several issues that can cause delays such as ability to gage staffing needs, prepare for scheduling time off, and in short, understanding your overall daily requirements. Being down even a few staff members can throw an entire day and deadline off schedule when you are looking at creating 2,500 manual orders daily into a production system. Dealing with such immense volumes manually itself is a hassle and can lead towards discrepancies resulting in low productivity. AtClose wanted to make a difference in handling bulk volumes through automation and the answer in fact was quite straight forward.
The automation gateway to order opening:
In order to process thousands of post-closing packages from multiple companies and lender, we required a unified solution that could improve our efficiencies and ensure we met client requirements regardless of the daily volumes we received. One of the major places we needed an uplift was in the order opening aspect. We noticed our customers were starting to include a standardized barcode page within their packages. After deciding to explore options utilizing this barcode and the capabilities of the AtClose platform we realized that we could easily connect to our clients and leverage their internal barcodes for the order creation within our system.
Eliminating manual order creation
The barcode and how we used it to automate the order creation aspect was a simple feature but had a major impact in terms of automating the entire order creation aspect. This feature has improved our efficiency by eliminating the need for manual order creation in most cases. This in turn allowed us to upscale when necessary, with no disruption to client service yet maintaining even better performance. Not having to rekey several orders a day is also a huge morale boost for our employees, and in today’s challenge of finding workers it is more important than ever. Today instead of manually creating majority of the orders, they simply point and click the client barcodes and the process is as automated as it can be. Leveraging the client barcodes has shown a reduction in the overtime costs, as we are able to output additional volume while still meeting our customers required SLA and improved our SLA on order creation to a 100%.
Final thoughts
AtClose’s integration capabilities allow us a wide range of ways through which we can utilize automation techniques to make the entire process faster. In this specific case, we realized that a client’s barcode contains information which can be used for automating the process of order creation. Hence, we were able to scale quickly while maintaining quality and reducing overall costs in resource efforts. It goes at this point without saying, that if you cannot control the barcode or receive the order electronically, then sometimes you must leverage what you can receive to accomplish your objective. Â