Solution Summary

American Pacific Mortgage (APM) leads the industry standard for delivering homeownership in America, with more than 800 loan advisors and branch managers in over 170 branch offices throughout the country. APM embarked on a digital transformation journey in adapting a cloud-first strategy with a rollout of Office 365, Microsoft Teams, and Azure for employee collaboration and communication.

Challenge

American Pacific Mortgage was seeking for a management tool that would enable deeper collaboration among their core branch operation teams, that would run on their Corporate SharePoint Intranet, nicknamed “THE HUB”. With the offices spanning numerous geographical territories, accurately scheduling, updating and tracking vital information across branches was time-consuming, and with so many moving parts, prone to human error. APM engaged Technovert to provide an ideal solution on their Office365 platform.

Solution Strategy

American Pacific Mortgage business transformation team collaborated with our team of Office 365 experts to map their branch operations process for keeping tracking of daily status, potential clients and follow notes across branches within their intranet. Technovert ‘s team found it ideal to utilize Microsoft PowerApps, Flow and Office 365 as the business application platform for the solution. The data for this solution was designed to leverage the Azure SQL server.

The application makes it possible to store vital information, track, and update their branch information of daily status, high-value client and meeting notes using SharePoint List and Excel. The app is built using Azure SQL as the main data source but with connections to SharePoint Online and Microsoft PowerApps.  Through these connections branch managers update and track changes from SharePoint, take action and trigger workflows with Flow that update the App, making the process efficient, error-free and secure.

Schematic diagram of the data integration and orchestration with PowerApps

The app uses multiple tables within the Azure SQL database. Information is pulled from several tables and displayed within the app. Once users view/update records, the information is synchronized back to SQL. Users fill daily branch status, notes, or new client information and can input their data in a single location, where it will be available for action, or the next time they meet for group meetings.

When managing branch information, the user information along with his branch details were queried from Microsoft Graph, allowing the users’ key information to be pulled, viewed, and stored without the hassle of manual entries. These types of usability features improve the user experience, and the customer experience, and save valuable time and effort while increasing accuracy and recollection.  An additional Power BI dashboard for branch managers and group org teams gives the functionality and the capabilities they need to effectively manage their org process.

Results

Employees of American Pacific Mortgage (APM) can now easily file their branch’s day to day information, while branch managers now can review and approve. By managing all this information centrally within Office 365, and having common processes for tracking data, accuracy is improved, and the whole process is much easier and more efficient for all users within the organization. The Branch Operations team became highly efficient in its core branch management process, along with the enabling of their on-field workforce.