DVT and global business process management software leader Metastorm have enabled South African electronic workflow solutions provider, L@W, to keep up with market conditions, increase client requirements and broaden the scope of its service offerings through the deployment of Metastorm BPM.
It allows the company to manage its business processes more intelligently.
L@W currently works with South Africa's largest financial institutions and over 2 000 law firms around the country. 80% of all bond registrations are processed via its secure platform.
Metastorm BPM is used as the foundation of the business process outsourced offering that connects financial institutions and law firms for bond registration.
"The Metastorm BPM implementation has turned our registration service into a major pillar for our organisation going forward," says Nik Steffny, head of operations at L@W. "Metastorm and DVT have given us the confidence to enhance and extend our deployment of Metastorm technologies across a variety of industries."
L@W guarantees confidentiality and privacy through the effective use of a public key infrastructure (PKI) that enables digital certificates for authentication of its subscribers.
The company focuses on the conveyancing procedure and property registration process in South Africa, allowing various stakeholders to exchange data electronically.
"The conveyancing process is a complex process both legally and administratively, and refers to all the work associated with transferring the legal ownership of real estate from one owner to another," says Trevor van Rensburg, products director at DVT. "The process consists of many sub-processes that can either be performed individually or are linked to other procedures in the process.
"Although L@W has been very successful in enabling organisations to exchange critical information and data through its trusted third-party platform, it wanted to make sure it was keeping up with market conditions and increasing client requirements by taking the business to a new level and moving away from simply switching information around," he says. "The company wanted to deploy a system that would enable it to manage business processes more intelligently and ultimately help with broadening the scope of its service offerings and value-add."
L@W originally operated against a home-grown system to switch messages between various clients but it was only able to process work on a small scale. It was also difficult to maintain and became complicated when items in the process needed to be changed.
The Metastorm BPM implementation now gives L@W the ability to:
* Develop highly innovative mission-critical solutions, hosted in its business process outsourcing mode;
* Manage its business processes more intelligently;
* Develop powerful applications rapidly;
* Provide a global view of process status information; and
* Integrate seamlessly and securely with PKI and other internal technologies.
"Innovative companies like L@W lead the way in their respective industries by streamlining operations and enhancing the customer experience," says Robin Martin, vice-president of international operations for Metastorm. "The goal with customers like L@W is to provide them with a robust BPM platform that is easy to implement and use, is scalable across the organisation and, most importantly, provides them with the advanced capabilities they need to differentiate themselves from others in the industry."
Metastorm BPM is being used by L@W as the foundation of a business process outsourced offering for property registration. This critical process offering is comprised of three key functions:
* Bond cancellation: the procedure that manages the cancellation of a registered bond when a property is sold so it can be transferred to the new buyer;
* Bond registration: the process that registers all appropriate legal documentation on a bond before a loan is funded; and
* Transfer of property ownership: the transferring of property ownership from one legal entity to another.
These high-level functions are initiated by external clients. All three processes contain a host of sub-processes that are orchestrated and managed in the background.
"Metastorm BPM is integrated with internal and external databases that pull necessary information to help with the completion of required forms," Van Rensburg says. "With PKI integration, control is passed over to Metastorm once client credentials are checked against the L@W user database. The company also has an XML integration layer that sits between its banking clients and the Metastorm BPM server to allow for XML data exchange. Using Web services, the bank will send an XML file with all necessary data where a process is initiated in Metastorm. XML files are then sent back to the bank also using Web services."
Based on the successes achieved with the Metastorm BPM implementation, L@W has instituted a three-year strategic plan to capture 85% of the South African market by 2009. The company has also bought Metastorm Envision and plans to use the product to model and simulate processes for its largest clients to help with identifying bottlenecks and analysing performance.
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