Franklin American Mortgage Company Saves Over 2,000 Hours of Work Each Year with Logi Symphony

About Franklin American Mortgage Company

Franklin American Mortgage is recognized as one of the fastest-growing mortgage companies in the nation. The company is dedicated to providing opportunities for families and individuals to achieve the dream of homeownership.

Overview

Challenges

• Crystal Reports could not achieve complex formats and instilled many
• reporting silos.
• Manually running and distributing reports was time-consuming.
• FAMC needed to centralize reporting and securely share assets and insights.

Solution

• FAMC chose Logi Symphony for easy embedding, improved scheduling, and the ability to promote secure sharing and reuse.
• Logi Symphony integrated with FAMC’s existing application, data, and stored procedures.
• Logi Symphony allowed FAMC to reproduce complex forms through advanced reporting layouts.

Benefits Summary

• Logi Symphony’s customizability enables FAMC to create precision reports and automate operations.
• Secure sharing of reports and custom data sets enables reusability.
• Scheduling reports with Logi Symphony eliminated the need to manually run and distribute reports, saving 40 hours per week.

Leveraging Existing Data

+ Leveraging SQL Server & MySQL

• New reports are now generated primarily from data stored in SQL Server with secondary sources in MySQL, PostgreSQL, and some imaging databases. FAMC continued to use its existing stored procedures.
• Data Governance for Self-Service
• Different departments can now securely share custom data extracts and perform their sorts, pivots, and drill-downs

Customizable Solution

Divisional Branding Requirements:
The three divisions of FAMC, correspondence, wholesale, and retail, each have distinct color and style branding. Logi Symphony enables them to create professional reports in exact accordance with their requirements.
High-Value Reporting Features:
Among the various advanced features FAMC values in Logi Symphony, the ability to enable detailed data sections, banded sections, and create sub-reports are the highest priority.

Different Reporting Styles

Collaboration with Excel Users:
FAMC’s reporting styles run the gamut from highly defined precisions reports to collaborative reports for Excel users. Logi Symphony enables exporting to Excel for further ad hoc analytics.
Logi Symphony is Critical to FAMC Operations:
Logi Symphony is critical to operations as loan officers capture data from clients in real-time after which Logi Symphony extracts the data into forms that are submitted and imaged.
Wide Range of Reporting Styles:
Logi Symphony helps FAMC with reports ranging from list reports such as loans within a specific loan-to-value or credit rating range, to complex loan applications, such as lengthy 10-03 forms.

The Challenge

Against a backdrop of increasing need for efficiency, Franklin American Mortgage Company’s (FAMC) business intelligence solution previously incurred significant development times, could not achieve required report formats, and stifled analytics sharing and reuse. They had relied on Crystal Reports, which instilled a model of various localized silos where users created their versions of commonly needed reporting and data assets.

After countless hours spent trying to replicate the precise format and layouts of government-mandated compliance forms, the mortgage giant was burdened by their existing toolsets and left in a situation where many reporting outputs required manual intervention before they reached a “ready-to-submit” state.

Manually running and distributing reports was also a time-consuming task that the company sought to automate. FAMC needed to centralize data and reporting, and efficiently share insights throughout their organization.

Easy Transition to a Better Solution

FAMC needed a reporting application with the ability to integrate with their core Java application, the standard for many of the company’s homegrown systems. After considering the newer version of Crystal Reports, Franklin American Mortgage Company chose Logi Symphony for superior support of complex report formats, improved scheduling, and governed sharing through a centralized reporting center.

“The ability to interact with Java allowed us to embed reports in our application, call from the application, and create a reporting center. We can also share assets so different reports have the same style and the data is presented in a similar structure,” said Angela Fox, Manager of Data Development, Franklin American Mortgage Company. “When I first started, I only had experience with Crystal Reports, and learning Logi Symphony was a very smooth transition. It’s fairly easy to use overall.”

Complex Reports Made Simple

With Logi Symphony, Franklin American Mortgage Company replicated many customer forms mandated by different government agencies. They were also able to achieve the exact formatting of customer letters to adhere to strict guidelines put forth by FAMC’s internal marketing department. “We are able to do all of that with Logi Symphony,” said Angie Fox.

Saving 40 Hours Every Week

Franklin American Mortgage Company has approximately 1,500 reports in their “Report Center”, which users can run on their own, plus over 250 that are scheduled to run regularly. Scheduling is a key component of the new capabilities provided by Logi Symphony. Previously, users needed to run and distribute the reports manually. In addition to consuming employee time, this slowed down their server resources. Now, reports can be scheduled to run at night when server utilization is low, putting reports in users’ email inboxes when they arrive in the morning. FAMC can also schedule reports with default parameters or allow users to run reports on demand with specified parameters.

“It was very simple to set the schedules up and to add and remove users. Scheduling reports has saved us trouble and has reduced the time and effort, enabling our employees to focus on our customers who are trying to buy homes. Considering our multiple divisions, we’ve probably saved the time of one employee per week just running and distributing reports. If every report that we now have scheduled were manual, it would take all day, every day to do it,” stated Ms. Fox.