Charm City Mortgage Current IS Infrastructure - Case Study Example

s 11 December Assessment of Charm Mortgage Current IS Infrastructure Introduction A thorough study into Charm City Mortgage’s current Information Technology Infrastructure and business reveals certain Key Performance Indicators that should be accounted for the business success. The study also shows a glimpse of technology usage prevalent in the organization. Research on technology usage in the organization shows that it’s lagging behind in the usage of information technology and there is a wide variety of processes that can be automated. To understand how these processes can be automated and what steps should be taken in order to increase the organizational efficiency, we need to understand the business processes and the key performance indicators that affect the organizational efficiency. The key performance indicators for the organization are listed below: Pricing: The interest rates fluctuate rapidly and the organization should quote newer rates whenever they are updated. These quotes are then quoted to the customer of the organization: mortgage brokers and real estate agents. Accommodating these quick changes and updating quotes is painstaking with current manual system of making an excel file (with pre-build calculations) and then printing and faxing them to the customers. Management of Interest Rate Locks: Interest Rates are to be booked or locked by the customer for the loan they are borrowing. Customer normally follows the interest rates market before making a decision to borrow or not. They may order a loan when the interest rate is the lowest; therefore, those bookings are very spontaneous and sudden in nature but needs to be accommodated. The locking is generated through an Information System but the records are stored and distributed to the borrower manually. Broker Relationship Management: The record of each broker’s performance is recorded in Excel files. These files at month end are sent to Towson’s Central Office where they are consolidated in another excel file and statistics are updated manually. We would look at how we can optimize these business processes and increase the organizational efficiency by enhancing these key performance indicators by either updating the current information technology mechanisms or deploying new information systems at the organization (Laudon, and Carol). Proposed changes for Information Technology Infrastructure After considering all the requirements and the modus operandi of the business, following changes are proposed: Implementation of a financial and accounting ERP that would record all the customer’s financial transactions in a centralized manner. This ERP will work in parallel with the Loan Origination software Implementation of a data warehouse that will be further aided with a reporting Business Intelligence Tool Implementation of a CRM that will provide all statistics about the customer Implementation of advanced Information Security mechanisms such as Honeypots and intrusions detection systems Improvements in current social marketing and networking mechanisms Case for ERP A financial small – scale ERP is a dire requirement for the organization since the loan origination software is not a complete package and cannot record transactions in totality. An ERP will be centralized software that will integrate operations of all the four branches namely Annapolis, Columbia, Towson and downtown Baltimore. In the initial phase, financial and accounting modules will be implemented that can be followed by other modules, if required. This ERP will use the same SQL Server 2005 database that is used for Loan Origination Application. At the start, the plan is to do pilot testing and use these implemented modules with the Loan Origination Application. For testing purposes, we will take a backup of this database and use it with the ERP. After the unit tests are successful we will use the live database with the ERP. The ERP will be a centralized application catering to all the four branches (more branches can be further added) and performing all the operations. The ERP will take live feed from different websites quoting interest rates as the input. As soon as there are changes in the live feed from the market, a trigger would be fired which will then dump relevant feeds in an excel file template. As soon as the file gets populated, a customized SSIS package will be fired which will extract customers email address (from the CRM System, discussed later) and email the populated excel file to those customers. As soon as the customer will receive the excel file, a confirmation email will be sent out to the respective manager. All this mechanism will be implemented within the ERP. As soon as the customer gets the file, he will review the interest rates and chose to lock or not lock the interest rate. If he chooses to lock interest rate, he will do it via the web interface of the ERP. All his transaction history will be recorded through the ERP. If he is a new customer, he will log into the web interface and get registered. The sales person will then verify his credentials and grant him privileges to request for interest rates and loan applications. The customer will also have a chance to trace his application and if any other documents are required for him. The customer gets an email in either case if his loan gets approved or not. Following are other advantages of implementing an ERP: Loan data will be now consolidated at one place, in real time. Consolidation will be done on real time basis and not at month end Knitting between branches will increase. Using the platform, managers and sales team of different branches can coordinate with each other Executives and Loan approvers will have holistic view of customer and not a distributed one, as of now All history of the transaction can be viewed in chronologic order and action owners can be traced, too Revenue generated can be traced from its realization to earned state All legacy systems will be synchronized and some of them will be eliminated Compiled statistics will be transparent and without noise All data will follow a certain organizational standard which will make it for everyone to understand different involved terminologies Case for CRM System and Social Media Enhancement As mentioned above, the ERP would require certain information from the CRM. CRM and ERP would be closely integrated since there will be a flow of information from customer relationship management into the ERP. A CRM System is an application that has a front-end interface for users and a back-end database. It allows an organization to keep each and every record of information pertaining to the customer. The IVR (Interactive Voice Response) call center for customers is also connected to the CRM. The CRM System maintains every customer interaction in its database. This interaction can be a call, an email, a form or even a tweet! This is some valuable information which needs to be incorporated and used in future marketing and sales campaign. Also, this information acts as an input to both the proposed ERP and Business Intelligence System (to be discussed shortly). The BI system using this information can gauge customer’s demographics and take intelligent decisions on its basis. CRM Systems saves a lot of efforts since it helps to automate monotonous routine tasks. The need for excel sheets will now be eliminated since all customer updated and older information will be provided on the fly. This information will be sent to BI system which will then provide more insights and statistics pertaining to different key performance indicators of assessing sales team and borrowers. The CRM System will also enable customers to follow formal procedures and best practices, thus, nothing out of business context could be done which would increase the efficiency of operations. This system will save considerable amount of time as customer engagement will decrease and the sales team will be able to dedicate more time to formulating strategies and planning activities. The customer, courtesy this system, will have one view all over the organization and there will be no anomalies in the view that different departments will have of one specific customer. These CRM systems will also help the sales force to keep a record on repeat sales and will help them to discover a potentially new set of interested customers from an undiscovered fragment. Several web activities like prospect relationship management can be enacted. One cannot deny the fact that social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Google Plus are the voice of people now in the market. Word of mouth is severely impacted by Facebook in particular and all other sites in general. Buying behaviors have changed, courtesy these sites and now most online buying is discussed on these sites. The general pattern followed today is that customers research companies and then they ask social media sites for recommendations and opinions. Maintaining a Facebook page and blog on the internet will help Charm City Mortgage to firm its standing in the market. It will also help it to know their candid customer feedback since these social sites aren’t moderated. It will help them know about their weaknesses and will provide how customer position their products and offerings. These activities on social networking sites will be integrated with the customer relationship management system and will allow the sales force to participate in the dialogue. It will also help them market newer products and support. This informal channel can come in real handy when conflicts would be required to resolve. This channel will also help them identify potential customers and can have easy access to customer’s personal information. This medium however needs to be used carefully since it can always backfire. Avenues for positive word of mouth can quickly convert into negative word of mouth even if one customer has a bad experience with the organization. The marketing team at Charm City Mortgage needs to carefully monitor these social media platforms and try to mediate as much space as possible. Case for Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence System With the implementation of both ERP and CRM, the need of a reporting cum Business Intelligence tools becomes inevitable. This is because both ERP and CRM will fail to provide ad hoc reporting. A conventional data warehouse for analysis by the business intelligence tool will be required. Direct access to database would be costly and therefore, data from both the operational systems databases (ERP and CRM) will be extracted transformed and loaded into the data warehouse at the day end. This extraction will be only of reporting fields and not of all data. Data Standardization and matching activities would be carried out. This data would be already in the filtered form since its coming from CRM and ERP. After getting into the data warehouse, it will be sent to the BI tool which will perform different algorithms on the data and convert it into some meaningful depictions such as KPI’s, Scorecards and interactive dashboards and will give the luxury of slicing, dicing and drill up and down to the managers and analysts at Charm City Mortgage. The Business Intelligence tool will also provide the luxury of building as and when needed algorithms and queries. Implementation of Honeypots and intrusion detection systems The current state of information security at Charm City Mortgage is alarming. There are no privileges or role setting and everyone in the organization can have access to every single bit of information. The database is shared and servers aren’t separated. Servers need to be separated for different applications and access should be restricted. Honeypots and intrusion detection systems such as network intrusion detection system need to be installed. Honeypots will act as sacrificial systems for intruders and will help the network team to access and forecast attacks. Different applications needs to be assigned different owners who will then distribute roles for each application in their designated team of experts Way to Implementation The implementation of stated applications and systems can be performed in three stages: Stage 1 This release will involve implementation of CRM and the initial separation of applications and servers Stage 2 This release will involve implementation of ERP, its testing in parallel with CRM and Loan Origination Application. Loan Origination Application will be phased out after complete testing of ERP. Social media sites and feed will be integrated with CRM and then SSIS packages will be integrated with the ERP. Intrusion detection system will also be implemented Stage 3 Data warehouse and BI tool will be implemented. Complete unit testing and then end to end testing would be done. Backups of databases will be used for testing. Honeypots will also be installed and their working will be tested through dummy intrusion attacks. Works Cited Laudon, Kenneth C., and Carol G. Traver. "Management Information Systems”. New York: Prentice Hall, 2011, 12th Edition. Web. 11 Dec. 2012. . Read More