Research Paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Research Paper - Essay Example To understand how these processes can be automated and what steps should be taken in order to increase the organizational efficiency, we need to understand the business processes and the key performance indicators that affect the organizational efficiency. The key performance indicators for the organization are listed below: Pricing: The interest rates fluctuate rapidly and the organization should quote newer rates whenever they are updated. These quotes are then quoted to the customer of the organization: mortgage brokers and real estate agents. Accommodating these quick changes and updating quotes is painstaking with current manual system of making an excel file (with pre-build calculations) and then printing and faxing them to the customers. Management of Interest Rate Locks: Interest Rates are to be booked or locked by the customer for the loan they are borrowing. Customer normally follows the interest rates market before making a decision to borrow or not. They may order a loan when the interest rate is the lowest; therefore, those bookings are very spontaneous and sudden in nature but needs to be accommodated. The locking is generated through an Information System but the records are stored and distributed to the borrower manually. Broker Relationship Management: The record of each broker’s performance is recorded in Excel files. ... Proposed changes for Information Technology Infrastructure After considering all the requirements and the modus operandi of the business, following changes are proposed: Implementation of a financial and accounting ERP that would record all the customer’s financial transactions in a centralized manner. This ERP will work in parallel with the Loan Origination software Implementation of a data warehouse that will be further aided with a reporting Business Intelligence Tool Implementation of a CRM that will provide all statistics about the customer Implementation of advanced Information Security mechanisms such as Honeypots and intrusions detection systems Improvements in current social marketing and networking mechanisms Case for ERP A financial small – scale ERP is a dire requirement for the organization since the loan origination software is not a complete package and cannot record transactions in totality. An ERP will be centralized software that will integrate operati ons of all the four branches namely Annapolis, Columbia, Towson and downtown Baltimore. In the initial phase, financial and accounting modules will be implemented that can be followed by other modules, if required. This ERP will use the same SQL Server 2005 database that is used for Loan Origination Application. At the start, the plan is to do pilot testing and use these implemented modules with the Loan Origination Application. For testing purposes, we will take a backup of this database and use it with the ERP. After the unit tests are successful we will use the live database with the ERP. The ERP will be a centralized application catering to all the four branches (more branches can