Workflow Designed for Integration

by Penny Lunt

Sterling Bank, a $2.5 billion Houston-based bank holding company, was growing fast. Installment loans were growing at 30 percent a year, commercial real estate loans at 25 percent and commercial loans at 20 percent.

With all this growth, the bank had no choice but to improve its loan-processing efficiency. Specifically, it wanted to reduce research time, eliminate missing and lost documents, improve data entry and make documents more accessible in order to improve auditing and customer service.

To fill this tall order, a project team determined that multiple software components would be required: remote loan document capture, centralized document storage, loan preparation workflow, loan processing workflow, audit and security measures and shared document access for all employees.

Wanda Matthews, project manager, looked at 30 software vendors and eventually settled on Ceyoniq, Herndon, VA (formerly Treev). One element that Ceyoniq brought to the table was an audit feature that tracks documents and worker activity.

"If a document is accidentally deleted, or if a loan officer is thinking about leaving [the company] and is requesting many copies of loan documents, we'll be able to see that and respond," she says.

Another strength of the Ceyoniq offering is ease of use. "We did an unannounced site visit at one of Ceyoniq's bank customers," Matthews says. "We met with a lender who said he was computer illiterate, yet he was hopping all over the system and showing us different features."

Ease of building workflows and integrating with existing software is a primary selling point for Ceyoniq, which offers a complete "content life cycle management" suite incorporating document imaging, document management and enterprise report management software. Process Manager workflow software is part of the suite, and it's also available as a stand-alone product. Used with ERP or CRM systems, Process Manager can extend the reach of those applications, enabling a Web self-service application, Siebel CRM and SAP system to work together to complete a customer transaction, for example.

"The great white lie of workflow is that no programming is required," says Steve Stoner, product manager. "If you don't need to program, then you don't need workflow; you could just route email. If you need to interface with other systems, you need to program."

To simplify workflow design and programming, Ceyoniq has embedded Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as well as a traditional graphical workflow designer interface. VBA lets developers easily generate code and then compile, test, debug and simulate workflows. Wizards help programmers build workflow tasks without having to write the code.

Integration is facilitated with reusable programming objects that perform database and API calls. It's further eased with a COM adapter, an XML adapter and a soon-to-come Java adapter. These all feed data into Oracle or SQL servers.

Audit trail and metrics features are useful in heavily regulated industries such as banking. These features let you track and log all document access and changes and generate a log of who accessed a document when.

With Process Manager's architecture, it's possible to run 16 server instances on a single machine. A work item, an entire work process or a process event can be assigned to one or many server instances. One high-volume event might be assigned to a large server, while many smaller events might be assigned to another. Microsoft Management Console lets you manage and monitor server configurations and workflow processes.

Process Manager has online workflow version control: If you change a workflow, new items can automatically flow through the new version, while existing items can stay with the old system without having to bring the system down to make the change.

Ceyoniq is targeting its workflow technology and broader content life cycle suite in vertical markets such as banking and telecommunications, and it has recently built interfaces to SAP and Siebel 7 software.

"The idea of integrating this workflow product with multiple systems is potentially useful," says David Bradshaw, a lead analyst at Ovum. "But I think there's a limited market for [stand-alone] workflow, whereas there's a huge market for [workflow] with document management."

Major competitors to Ceyoniq are FileNet and SERSolutions, both of which offer workflow as part of larger content management suites.

While Ceyoniq offers Process Manager as a stand-alone solution, customers including Sterling Bank are combining it with other components of the company's software suite. Sterling has combined imaging, workflow and enterprise report management to transform its loan preparation and processing. Loan data is entered automatically, and audits and reports are generated without human intervention. All told, the bank expects to save more than $400,000 over the next four years through use of this software.