Overview:
Makeen Technologies was chosen to help Eastside Funding better utilize software systems for loan portfolio management by increasing automation, document management, and records management capabilities within the company. After discussing and evaluating their needs, Makeen was able to develop a three-phase system that greatly improves internal workflows while minimizing unnecessary data input.
The Company
Eastside Funding is a portfolio management company located in Seattle, Washington which has loaned over one billion dollars’ worth of real estate and over 7,000 properties since 2004. Eastside focuses on borrowing on foreclosures, bank owned, REO, and short-sale properties with no qualifying, appraisals, or inspections. Eastside has many varied programs to assist investors seeking to acquire distressed, residential, commercial, and raw land deals by providing on the spot financing at foreclosure auctions. Given the nature of their business it was difficult to locate any one solution which could fulfill their needs, so Makeen was chosen to evaluate their current processes, document management, and infrastructure to determine a more appropriate approach to how they do business and ultimately reduce time and money spent managing and inputting data.
The Challenge
When Makeen entered the picture, Eastside Funding was working with an overwhelming amount of data in dozens of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. In some cases, data needed to be entered up to five consecutive times for each loan with over ten people working on the paper flow and tedious data entry. Additionally, the infrastructure would not let multiple systems speak to one another which resulted in little automation or document management. The task at hand for Makeen was to determine a more appropriate approach for Eastside Funding to conduct their business electronically and ultimately reduce time and cost for managing and inputting data.
The Discovery
The process Makeen Technologies took to learn about Eastside Funding proved to be tricky at first, given how busy everyone was. With a little bit of persistence, each individual over the course of a month was met with in person to determine their workflows, tools, and processes of their job. This information was then relayed to our team to better understand what could be done to speed up processes and implement more automation.
Design & Concept
The primary concept behind Makeen’s development for Eastside funding was to meet and achieve the overall goals of the company. As Eastside’s business was relatively unique, given that there are not a lot of lenders that focus on the same market, the primary objective was to ensure that at the end of the day they can do their job more effectively and efficiently than before. Additionally, as in many of Makeen’s projects, usability and design also played major roles in developing the platform and ensuring the overall success of the project.
Implementation & Delivery
The system Makeen developed for Eastside funding was deployed over three phases. Once each phase was implemented, Makeen gathered feedback and continually worked to solve or add functionality as needed to meet the needs of the client.
Phase One of the project implemented the basics for document management and data entry. It included features that allowed users to collect and enter data from auctions, borrowers, investors, about properties, property lenders. Users could generate the loan, and calculate rates and fees. Additionally, phase one helped Eastside Funding generate 12 documents in PDF and Word which could be printed or shared with clients as needed.
Phase two of the project focused on automation and reusing data already entered into the system in addition to auto-calculating financial data for the loan. Phase two was integrated with Phase One and was set to launch a few weeks after Phase One.
Phase Three focused on the client and providing them with a secure portal to access information about their loans and assets with Eastside Funding. Phase Three represented the final phase and required building an external portal that was both intuitive and user-friendly to the clients of Eastside Funding.
Technology
Makeen Technologies chose out of box SharePoint as the primary platform to build Eastside Funding’s Solution on. Visual Studio was used for all code written by Makeen, and no third party applications were used. SharePoint was overhauled to take on a custom look for Eastside Funding and break away from that out-of-box feel and give it a personalized look and branding.
