ECM Software for Auto Industry

As the nation’s largest used car dealership network and finance company, DriveTime provides underwriting, financing and account servicing for auto loans to help people find and finance great used cars. Offering unique customer terms, DriveTime provides advance rates and flexible deal structures by looking at the auto industry as the dealer sees it – not just the lender.

With over 835,000 vehicles sold to customers with varying credit types, DriveTime relied on an outdated document management system to manage their rapid business development. But with approximately 150 dealerships sending in deal related documents, many problems with the legacy system continued to arise.

Their existing document management software could not be upgraded, and thus resided on outdated hardware and software technologies, delaying the availability of electronic documents required to verify and approve the funding of loans. Because of the impact on both system performance and system reliability, it causing a great drain on internal support resources, making it critical to have a robust, scalable, and performance based document management system to the underwriting component of DriveTime’s business. DriveTime had no choice but to look for a new solution.

As a result, the financial auto dealership turned to the GlobalSearch suite of solutions from Square 9® Softworks. Since implementing GlobalSearch, administrative tasks have drastically improved at DriveTime. Previously it would take staff members five minutes simply to retrieve a paper document, but now with GlobalSearch, that process is reduced to as little as five seconds. DriveTime’s Underwriting team has been able to verify and approve loans for funding at a more rapid rate thanks to GlobalSearch. As dealerships send in deal packets via fax or email, these 40-50 page documents are captured directly into GlobalSearch.

In addition, with around 9,000 pages worth of new dealer applications, GlobalSearch has helped DriveTime’s Dealer Services team store, retrieve and manage all new partner packages in a fast and efficient manner. GlobalSearch’s built-in KeyFree Indexing modules allows staff to effortlessly index document without manually keying data, and the advanced search capabilities of GlobalSearch made it easy to archive documents for accurate batch exports.

DriveTime is also leveraging Square 9’s new GlobalCapture® document capture automation solution. DriveTime leverages GlobalSearch’s multiple capture servers for handling large document batches, speeding up their capture workflow processes. They even utilize Barcode Recognition so that the system can read information embedded in barcodes within email attachments and paper deal jacket documents to automatically follow through with indexing and notification. Previously, the Title group would individually print out a barcode header page for each vehicle title being scanned in. Receiving about 250 titles at one time and taking approximately two minutes per title, the team was wasting over 8 hours on this repetitive task. With GlobalCapture’s Barcode Recognition, all titles can be scanned at once. Now, the entire process takes about five minutes for all 250 titles.

As part of their daily process, DriveTime sends out all customer related letters, including account statements and loan modification confirmations, which can add up to over 2,000 letters daily. But thanks to GlobalCapture, batch importing and indexing happens automatically, eliminating this time consuming process.

In addition, DriveTime’s IT department has built a service integrating with GlobalSearch that notifies users when new and follow-up documents have arrived for the specific deals they are working on. Approximately 50 email documents (each ranging from 10-20 pages in length) are linked to deals and emailed to the Underwriting team each week, streamlining productivity like never before.

From a monetary standpoint, DriveTime’s return on investment has surpassed their expectations. In the past, nine employees handled paper documents, spending 1-2 hours making copies daily. This accumulates up to $7,800 a year in salary expenses saved solely on photocopying; not to mention 520 hours a year now repurposed for more useful tasks. Plus, spending about $200 a month in filing necessities, DriveTime has saved $9,600 in supplies alone since implementing GlobalSearch.

Pleased with GlobalSearch and how easy it is to use from both an end-user and administrative perspective, DriveTime will soon expand throughout its affiliate organization and into the Accounts Payable department to assist with Vendor Management and invoices. To learn more about DriveTime, visit http://www.drivetime.com/.

Interview: Jason Webster, Sr. Business Systems Analyst, DriveTime Automotive Group, Inc.

Q. What business challenges led you to Square 9’s software solutions?

Jason Webster: Before GlobalSearch, we had a document management system that could no longer support the volume and growth projections of the company. We have to maintain paper files for all of our dealers which is a very cumbersome task especially since we have limited filing space and these sign up packages can often be quite large. There were also numerous customizations made to the legacy system in order to make the tool work for many different business processes. These customizations led to challenges in upgrading the existing system, to a point where the tool was reaching end-of-life. It was important that we had something with capture processing flexibility and we needed a system with the ability to use multiple file formats while also being capable of capturing documents from various external sources such as email and fax, plus internal scanning, email and drag & drop.

Q. How have daily processes changed since implementing GlobalSearch?

Webster: Whenever we were ready to review the packages we would have to scan in the entire dealer packet, email it to ourselves, and then email it again to whoever else needed to review the file. This was not very efficient as our scanner often could not handle such large files. Plus, if we ever needed to quickly find any particular document we would have to manually pull the file and then sort through multiple papers. But with GlobalSearch and GlobalCapture, scanning large quantities of files can be done quickly and efficiently, and if we ever need to find something, all our documents are in one place and GlobalSearch’s search and retrieval functionality makes it easy to find any and all document for specific customers.

In addition, the Loan Servicing system has a direct link to GlobalSearch that will pull up the particular documents for a loan. Similarly, the Customer Service Administration team has a workflow process that links directly to account-specific documents in GlobalSearch when an Automated Clearing House sign-up comes in. The team then reviews the electronic document and proceeds to sign the customer up for automatic payments.

Q. In what ways has Square 9’s product suite improved business performance?

Webster: GlobalSearch has allowed for deal fundings to almost triple since last year. Emails are linked directly to their associated account within the database, creating a true paperless process. This has saved the Underwriting team from printing each document and scanning it directly into the system, greatly improving our business performance and our efficiency levels as well. This allows users to focus their efforts on deals that contain the documents they require in order to approve the deal for funding. With 30 specialists on the Underwriting team, this reduces the time each of them spends on their deals by approximately 1 hour – leading to quicker approvals for deal funding.

Overall, with GlobalSearch DriveTime has been able to streamline workflows in multiple areas, saving over 500 pages of paper each week. Dealer Services have seen severe reductions in storage and Underwriting has been able to reduce the need to hire additional temporary seasonal staff by four employees.

Q. Would you recommend GlobalSearch?

Webster: Yes, I would recommend GlobalSearch. It is a very user friendly tool from both an end-user standpoint as well as administrative. The capture process works well, and the architecture is designed to integrate with other systems where required. As a document heavy business, it was important for us to find a solution that could not only help us store all the paperwork, but grow alongside our business as new customers come in as well – and GlobalSearch does just that.