GMAC Commercial Mortgage Goes Paper Free

The edict came right from the top. In February 2000, David Creamer, CEO of GMAC Commercial Mortgage (GMACCM), declared that the company - the largest commercial mortgage underwriter in the United States - would move to paper-free operation. Creamer envisioned a "virtual company" in which employees could gain access to documents at any time, from anywhere.

Before Creamer's edict most information at the the Horsham, PA-based company could be found in both electronic and paper format, making document control difficult. GMACCM employees had to copy documents and search for content that couldn't be properly tracked.

Initially, the idea of paper-free operations seemed impossible, notes Larry Hoffman, GMACCM's director of imaging and workflow.

"We have 60 origination offices servicing 47,000 loans and are the largest servicer of Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac and FHQ loans," says Hoffman, detailing the company's massive operations. "We also provide escrow administration, client relations, asset administration and some servicer monitoring, payment processing, risk management and investor and IRS reporting."

One of GMACCM's first moves was to overhaul its imaging and document management systems. The company selected OnBase from Hyland Software (www.onbase.com), Rocky River, OH, to bring all its information, including document images, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, emails, PDFs and more than 1,800 AS/400 reports, into a single management environment.

While OnBase is at the heart of a network of Web-accessible content stores, GMACCM created its own access layer with customized interfaces for specific departments and functions. NT authentication validates the nearly 2,000 employees who access the system worldwide. OnBase user groups determine access to content stores.

Due to the records-intensive nature of loan processes, the document paradigm still applies, but everything is managed digitally. "We have created a global system that has Web-enabled access documents through an e-document management system," Hoffman explains.

GMACCM's imaging operations are massive, with 100,000 documents captured per day at imaging centers in Horsham; Washington; San Francicso; Chicago; Pasadena, CA; Birmingham, AL; and Mullingar, Ireland.

"There are 3,591 document types, and 90 percent of everything received is scanned the same day with less than 24-hour turnaround," says Hoffman. With 30 different index fields to keep track of across all documents, "it's a very intense environment," he adds.

The company is using Ascent Capture software from Kofax (www.kofax.com), Irvine, CA, for scanning, image cleanup, barcode reading, OCR and indexing. In Europe, GMACCM is deploying Ascent's distributed validation feature, which will allow documents from across the continent to be scanned in Ireland or Paris and then indexed by personnel in local markets reviewing documents via the Internet.

"When you're dealing with information from multiple countries, you have the issue of different languages," Hoffman says. "We need the indexing and validation to occur where the documents came from because they're familiar with the language."

Once loan documents are available electronically, automated workflows accelerate business processes. E-forms are used to initiate internal processes. Routing, timed events and escalation features keep loans on track, and ApproveIt e-signature technology from St. Laurent, Quebec-based Silanis (www.silanis.com) is used at each stage of approval. In all, more than 20 workflows have been deployed.

As of August, 2.3 million documents with more than 16 million pages were being managed electronically. The company is handling as many as 500 funds management transactions and more than 150 corporate accounting transactions per day purely electronically.

For now, GMACCM is on track to being paper free internally by the end of the year, and Hoffman says there's been a huge payoff in loan processing speed and operational efficiency. With the exception of activities such as mortgage closings, the company expects to move most external processes away from paper by extending secure online workflows to its commercial customers.

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