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GAC uses Fiorano Platform to integrate its Web Enabled B2B Platform, Gators
General American Corporation (GAC), leader in the $25 Billion real estate settlement services market in the United States, provides services to the first mortgage, refinance and equity lenders industry. It also licenses its core B2B web-enabled technology solution, GATORS through its affiliate ATOR Systems.
Business expansion to meet demand growth
Fiorano Platform
GAC uses GATORS, its proprietary, web enabled B2B vendor management platform to provide services to the mortgage finance industry. Before deployment of the Fiorano solution, management of GATORS involved huge expenses of custom programming, testing and extensive system downtimes leading to lost revenues and extended time-to-market. With over 30,000 vendors and 750,000 mortgage transactions worth billions of dollars processed in a single year, GAC needed to find ways to meet the increasing demands of customers and vendors for speed, service and responsiveness, all at a reduced cost.
GAC customers used the GATORS system to regularly place orders, do status tracking and updating, run property searches, title searches, title commitments, check broker price opinions etc., submitting thousands of such requests every day. GAC needed to find ways to meet the increasing demands of customers and vendors for speed, service and responsiveness, all at a reduced cost.
- Differing Data formats
- Long Product Release Cycles
- System downtimes
- High Maintenance Costs
- No Error Tracking
Managing heterogeneous platforms and data formats through GATORS in its current form involved huge expenses of custom programming, testing and extensive system downtimes leading to lost revenues and extended time-to-market.
What GAC needed was a real-time change management system for GATORS with error handling facilities which could be implemented without disruption to it's existing operations and utilize investments in its existing infrastructure.
Mortgage Transactions
Fiorano Platform helps GAC achieve real-time competencies
"Fiorano Platform provides us with a flexible platform for future expansion with some major value adds like Real Time error notification"
Norman Gottschalk, VP of IT, General American Corporation
A successful approach to the GAC problems and Business Objectives involved a paradigm shift in the way the solution was approached. GAC had a proprietary server that did not lend well to making changes to Business Processes dynamically. However, GAC wanted to extract value from its existing investments, not spend more money on buying new infrastructure.
The process requirements demanded support for synchronous request response, reliable asynchronous messaging, a store and forward mechanism, extensive transformations from XML to XML, XML to flat file and vice versa, communication over multiple protocols like HTTP/HTTPs, FTP, SMTP, POP3, SOAP, WSDL etc.
Fiorano Platform addressed each of the technical issues that in combination achieved the business objectives set out by GAC at the beginning
Fiorano Deployment Architecture at General American Corporation
Simplified and Flexible Change Management: Fiorano Platform service oriented and event-driven architecture enabled change management to be a simple and cost effective exercise, allowing GAC to rapidly respond to market requirements. The system became simple and flexible enough to 'reconfigure' or 'rewire' based on changing business requirements, allowing new customers to be easily integrated into the existing system Event-based Error Tracking: Fiorano Platform allowed real-time monitoring and debugging of components out of the box including a powerful automated error reporting mechanism and functionality to raise alerts and notifications.
Non-intrusive deployment of Fiorano Platform was perhaps the most valuable benefit to GAC. The solution was deployed seamlessly on top of existing hardware and software infrastructures without disruption to existing systems and operations
Business Process Definition in Real-Time
Reduce Iterative Manual Programming Effort: Handling differing data formats across multiple communication channels now became a cinch for GAC Managers. Using the Fiorano Platform graphical user interface (GUI), business managers could now easily respond to customer requests for changes to data formats by simply using a drag and drop approach. Pre-built adapters shipped with Fiorano Platform provided ready means of communication across multiple protocols like HTTP/HTTPs, FTP, SMTP, POP3, SOAP, EJB and JMS. This meant custom coding was no longer required.
Fiorano Platform component-based architecture enabled de-coupling of different vendor and customer interfaces thereby enabling new customer interfaces to be plugged into the existing system seamlessly. Addition/Changes for one customer did not require the entire system to be brought down. No longer had dealing with one block of monolithic code, the resulting loosely coupled system also enabled modification of the existing process flows on the fly. For instance, within a Fiorano Platform flow, one could now easily replace one transformation with another without stopping the flow or affecting any application components.
Fiorano Platform provided precisely the kind of integration platform that GAC was looking for. Fiorano Platform addressed each of the problems that GAC was facing, met all its business criteria and provided a flexible platform for future expansion and re-use providing an unmatched return on investment.
"After an intensive evaluation process, Fiorano Platform became the logical choice," said Chris Behning, Senior VP of IT at General American. "It was the only solution that offered simplicity, flexibility and ease of use. It's unique architecture and powerful tools enabled a non-intrusive implementation, optimizing our existing investment without disrupting operations. Added to this was Fiorano's proven track record as a provider of leading edge technology supporting mission critical operations at Fortune 500s worldwide." he added.