For Truliant Credit Union’s document management…
The Third Time’s the Charm

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By Gordon E.J. Hoke, eVisory Consulting, copyright 2003 all rights reserved

Paper and records pose a major dilemma for growing credit unions. Today’s CUs struggle to balance access, storage, retrieval and stringent legal requirements. While all want to improve processes, many labor just to maintain the status quo.

Document automation technology – including imaging, report management, workflow, and forms processing – holds much promise, but the challenge to find a solution that fits into an existing system and meets statutory stipulations can be overwhelming. A solution must be affordable, compatible and easy to learn, and it must work equally well for a small pilot project and an entire, growing enterprise.

Truliant Federal Credit Union (www.truliantfcu.org) faced this dilemma in 1999. Proud of its history of using leading-edge technology, Truliant started document imaging in 1989 with a single-user system. This gave way to an eight-user system a few years later. Initially an improvement, that “solution” turned into a headache. “It was closed, proprietary, and inflexible, and it couldn’t be expanded,” recalls Thom Beck, CIO and Senior Vice President for Operations. “It didn’t allow the credit union to grow the way we wanted to."

Hoping to better serve a steadily expanding membership, Beck recognized the need to try for document efficiency a third time.

Truliant, based in Winston-Salem, N.C., has 23 branch offices in the southeastern United States. Assets run over $900 million, and there are 170,000 members. Truliant runs on a homegrown database and information system named Polaris. Beck (the system architect) insists that technology improve both member services and operational efficiency. Thus, when the unwieldy second-generation imaging system ran out of room as vendor support dwindled, Beck charged ahead.

He formed a project team headed by Supervisor of Computer Operations Diane Schaap. The team generated a shopping list of desired technologies that included imaging, report management, barcoding, character recognition, forms processing, and the potential for workflow. The solution would feature a scaleable database, internal resources for structured queries, and a vendor with both impeccable support and a clear vision for future development.

Beck’s guidelines for the project team required compatibility with Polaris. Additionally, the new system would be:

• Internet-protocol based so it would easily plug into Truliant’s network,
• Technically current and able to incorporate forthcoming technology,
• Scaleable with open technology such as a Windows server base,
• Built on open database structures, and
• Non-proprietary.

“We have one big, ‘intergalactic’ intranet over five states carrying data, video, and voice,” Beck explains, “and we wanted the new system to work our way.”

The project team formulated a Request for Proposals and took it to AIIM (www.aiim.org), the world’s largest trade show for document and content management.

“It was like being in a candy store a mile long,” smiles Schaap. “We visited every booth and came home with a list of about eight vendors that we liked.” Back at home, the team contacted references, got Dunn & Bradstreet reports, and, as Schaap puts it, “hounded the vendors with questions.”

Imaging Technician Andrew Lamberson, a project team member, relates, “We invited three or four companies to come to Winston-Salem to give demos and look at our situation, especially Polaris. Those visits narrowed the field to two vendors. When one of those switched prices on us, we took a site visit with the other, Optical Image Technology (www.docfinity.com). That convinced us.”

“It came down to this,” relates Schaap. “OIT’s system [DocFinity®] was open in design, and they were willing to work with us to help us do what the Credit Union needed. Polaris uses data from multiple SQL servers, and we wanted to quickly access images in our own interface without extra software on our client PCs. A thin client gives our users speed, so our front offices use the standard Windows viewer. (Our back office now uses OIT’s viewer.)”

Schaap was impressed with DocFinity’s easy administration. For example, it was simple to set up new users and assign security rights. “We felt very comfortable with OIT,” she continues. “Everything was positive, and it wasn’t just talk. Other vendors gave us limitations.”

“There were two big criteria,” adds Beck. “First, we went to them and said, ’We don't want your front end, we want to use ours. We don't want to open two applications, we want Polaris to read your database structure and open up your software.’ They were intrigued and said, ‘Fine, let's do it your way.’ They didn't need a special API or to unravel code. Their software just talks to ours in its native format. None of the other solutions we considered would do that.

“Second, a very key point was the company’s attitude,” Beck continues. “We have vendors and we have business partners, and the difference is this: Am I just buying something from them, or is their product an integral part of our operation? We wanted to convert every image since 1990 to the OIT system, and the cost was small compared to the advantage. They were willing to work with our old stuff as well as our new. That makes them a business partner, not just a vendor.”

Both Beck and Schaap sing the praises of OIT, the company and its products. When asked for any negatives, they can only cite an unrelated installation blip. “A fiber channel card on the server was dropping the imaging system,” Beck notes. Although this was not a DocFinity problem, OIT offered support, and the issue was quickly resolved. Since then, calls to OIT support have been infrequent, but Schaap appreciates the ready availability.

Functions

Today OIT’s DocFinity software reaches into most offices in every branch, but it is so low-profile that few workers even think of it. Truliant staff members read information on their Polaris screens as they always have. If they want to see the image of a document that supports their screen information, they click on a datum and, almost instantaneously, they see the image.

All information relating to customer/members is available because all paper documents come from the branches to the Winston-Salem headquarters. There, three scanners and their operators turn about 9,000 single- and multi-page documents into quality-controlled images every month. DocFinity automatically indexes most forms. After scanning, most of the paper is stored offsite for two years, the legal requirement, before shredding. IRA certificates are kept on paper for seven years. Also, DocFinity automatically processes about 265,000 single and multi-page statements into the system every month.

After scanning, OIT software routes the images to a Storage Area Network where they reside for three months. Then the images migrate to a 128-disk jukebox, each disk holding 9.2 gigabytes of information. The jukebox sports four drives for rapid retrieval. The storage system, currently only about one-third full, can expand by over 150 percent. Beck foresees no need for expansion at this time. Backup is another matter.

“We are big on backup and disaster recovery,” notes Schaap. “We have a tape library utility that backs up data and images nightly. The tapes go offsite. We redundantly do a daily backup of our SQL OIT database with incremental backups during the day and a full backup each night to SAN. We make copies of our SAN to optical disks, which we store offsite. It’s probably overkill, but we want to be sure.”

The 23-branch network uses T1 phone lines for communication. These handle data, images, voice and duplex video. Inside the branches are kiosks with touchscreen displays where members can see and talk with customer service representatives in Winston-Salem. This satisfies both the timid and the curious.

The Truliant call center’s 80 representatives handle about 55,000 calls per month. Any information a member might request is available immediately. With a few keystrokes, staff members fax, mail or e-mail missing statements, checks, payment schedules, incomplete applications, and other documents. In the wake of DocFinity’s installation, call center workers report a considerable rise in member satisfaction.

“We actually fulfill members’ requests while they wait,” declares Kim Turner, a branch manager who recently moved from Martinsville, Va. to the Frontis Plaza office in Winston-Salem. “Before, there was a three or four day wait for a document copy, but now we give them a copy on the spot.”

The new satisfaction extends to the Truliant staff. “The biggest difference is the ease of the new system,” reports Jessica Poplin, Member Service Specialist. “You don’t have to go to a whole other system to get images.”

“For me, the efficiency means no more overtime,” Lamberson adds. “Before, I was working late most days, but now I go home at 5 p.m. It’s a lot less frustrating when you don’t have to do all the indexing manually.”

The DocFinity system makes a similarly important contribution toward foiling fraud.

Tellers throughout the system call up signature cards and photos to positively identify people. Loan officers compare the signature on a loan application with that on file. “We had a member who faxed in a loan application from a car dealership,” illustrates Poplin. “He wanted to buy a car with a loan that required his wife’s signature, but she wasn’t there, so he forged her signature. Back here, we compared the loan application with the image of her signature verification card and denied the loan.”

Another boon is in records management, specifically, tracking car titles. When a member purchases a car with a Truliant loan, the member must deliver the title to the credit union for archiving. Before DocFinity, there was no efficient way to identify missing titles. Now, however, each loan application carries a barcode; when a title arrives for a loan-bought car, an imaging technician prints a matching bar code on a sticker which is affixed to the title and scanned. When a loan file lacks the title, the software recognizes the incompletion and automatically generates a reminder letter to the member. If the title does not arrive within a set period, it appears on a report for a representative to contact the member.

Beck points out that despite the functionality (only a portion of which is documented here), “The cost of maintaining the desktop is very inexpensive because we don’t have to maintain a separate application. When we had to upgrade our server, there was no issue with OIT and no expense. We know how to upgrade a server, and a simple call to OIT finished the job.”

Looking Ahead

While Truliant shows no sign of slowing growth, Beck and Schaap are confident that their document system will handle any expansion. They expect to add a workflow engine to expedite image routing. Electronic forms processing will eliminate paper and reduce the scanning load.

In the future, Lamberson predicts, members will fill out electronic forms on screens at home or at branches, and workflow will take the forms to headquarters. DocFinity will assemble files and populate databases without human intervention. “The system is open-ended,” he declares. “If anyone has an idea, they can pretty much do it. If you want to work with a custom program, OIT is good at that. They have found ways to make it all work for us.

“To me, success is the things you can do beyond what you thought of initially. We really got our money’s worth,” he concludes.

On its third try, Truliant found a document management system with no apparent limits. There are no expectations of needing to try again.

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This story originally appeared on the CUES Tech Port® Web site (www.cuestechport.com) on March 31, 2004.