Universal Mind Helps Dorado Scale Flex Development at Major U.S. Bank
“Universal Mind’s knowledge of Flex is enterprise class.”
It took only 50% of the standard deployment time for one of the five largest U.S. banks to build an entire web-based mortgage origination system that is completely paperless end-to-end. The system transforms the origination experience - making it far less expensive, much faster, and far more user-friendly than traditional paper-based or other web-enabled systems competitors will likely introduce.
To accomplish this feat, the bank turned to Dorado Corporation, based in San Mateo, California. Dorado provides tailored web-based loan origination and fulfillment solutions that integrate all internal and external lending activities. Dorado customers include three of the top five lenders in the U.S. and eight of the top 20.
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Universal Mind a Key Partner
Vital to that success is Dorado’s expertise in areas such as Adobe Flex, the technology on which much of the new mortgage origination system is based. Carol Crowe, project manager, cites Universal Mind as a key partner helping Dorado find some of its best Flex developers.
“The advantage of working with developers from Universal Mind, says Carol, “is the level of professionalism and seniority they bring.”
Such attributes are essential, Carol says, given the project’s extremely advanced technology. A good example is technology that makes users feel right at home on the system. “What users see on the screen may look like paper - in fact, we call it digital paper. But what digital paper can do goes far beyond what real paper can do - and far beyond what either a traditional web-based or client-server application can provide.”
She cites several examples:
“If you move your mouse over text you can update the page, the item becomes a form box you can type into and edit. When you move the mouse away, the form box disappears and the page looks again like a cleanly printed original mortgage document. If there’s a table on the page - let’s say a table of funds due at closing - you can insert additional table rows or columns if you need them, or recalculate totals right on the page. You don’t have to leave the workspace. You don’t have to wait for a web refresh. And you don’t have to worry that a web session will expire if another task interrupts you. Documents can stay on your desk, yet are web-based; so multiple users can share them, attach notes to them, and add information to them from remote databases with just a mouse click.”
That has tremendous productivity advantages, Carol says. So does the ability to see all loan activities in a single plan overview with ubiquitous search and tabbing of the workspace - allowing users to multitask effectively.
But features like these that make life easier for users can also make life harder for developers - since those features often call for technologies still unfamiliar to many. That is why Dorado insists that its developers - like those from Universal Mind - meet rigorous professional standards.
“Initially, we had our doubts,” Carol says. “My technical managers stated that, ‘It takes six weeks to get someone up to speed on this.’ But within three weeks we saw that the Universal Mind developers were taking construction hours off the table. They were hitting our delivery milestones. And the quality was very good. Even if there were bugs, which were rare, the Universal Mind developers provided a quick turnaround.”
Enterprise Class Expertise
Among the reasons Dorado chooses to partner with Universal Mind is its developers’ expertise in Flex, a suite of development technologies for building rich Internet applications. In combination with the Adobe Flash Player, Flex delivers the fast response and high level of functionalityan application like mortgage origination requires. It also includes features that allow systems to scale very large without a big increase in development effort.
“Universal Mind’s knowledge of Flex is enterprise class,” Carol says. “A lot of developers say they know Flex, but not many have developed a true enterprise Flex application. Universal Mind has - many times over. Its developers know Flex plus they know all the other elements that go into a major web deployment - like how to unblock database I/O bottlenecks and how to configure app servers to fully optimize multi-threaded performance.”
Enterprise class expertise is critical on a project the size of the bank’s mortgage origination system, Carol says. The application includes over 2,560 unique Flex components, contains over 30 modules, and can support over 6,000 daily users.
It’s also a level of execution that becomes obvious the day an application goes live. “Tomorrow - 6:00 p.m. Friday, Pacific Time - we will put the application in the test environment. At 9:00 Saturday morning, East Coast time, the bank will log in for the first time. They expect an enterprise class performance.”