To find the right solution, the company’s Director of Enterprise Architecture & Solutions Delivery, Mohsin Khalil, led a team that conducted extensive research on automation tools and business rules engines, focusing particularly on AI support, scalability and dashboarding capabilities. They ultimately selected the IBM® Business Automation Workflow and IBM Operational Decision Manager solutions, both components of the IBM Cloud Pak® for Business Automation suite. Recognizing that they couldn’t do it alone, they turned to IBM for advice on a potential implementation partner. That’s how Salient Process, a global provider of hyperautomation services and solutions and an IBM Business Partner, got into the picture.
While IBM’s endorsement had significant weight in their decision, and Salient had strong reference accounts, Khalil and his team wanted the confidence that Salient could not only deliver the solution it was after, but also meet FCT’s transformation timetable. “We saw the choice of a partner as just as important, if not more so, than the technology components,” he says.
A successful proof of concept (POC) solution, developed in roughly three months, gave FCT the confidence it sought—and then some, Khalil explains. “We were really satisfied with the spirit of partnership and collaboration, and the shared sense of commitment, that the Salient team showed from the start,” he says. “And since then, our relationship has continued to grow and adapt as the project has unfolded. To us, that’s pretty much the definition of solid transformation partner.”
As an automation solution, the first step in the implementation was to map out and document the process flows to be automated. For each process, Salient’s analysts held meetings with FCT process owners to identify and analyze the details of each process flow. The fact that the team relied on the IBM Blueworks Live solution to visually display these flows not only accelerated the effort, but also uncovered insights that proved invaluable in the subsequent process automation stage.
One of the key takeaways from the process work, says Khalil, was the need to create a kind of “dual-flow” approach to handling lender inquiries, which up to that point had been entirely one-to-one human interaction. “It’s like the ‘80/20’ rule. We determined that much of the more routine tasks could be automated, which would free up time for employees to focus on more impactful work that helps our customers,” he explains, “while some—due to complexity or other factors—would require a greater degree of personal contact.”
This flexibility is critical for the simple reason that no two lenders are exactly the same in terms of practices and procedures. So having the ability to codify and modify the rules that govern process flows—simply—is an elegant way to accommodate these inherent differences.