GMAC leverages Kofax capture to automate processing of commercial loan documents

Kofax explains how General Motors have utilized its capture solution to aid difficulties in document search and retrieval.

The Situation

General Motors, known for its trucks and cars, also operates one of the largest commercial finance businesses in the industry. The company's financial group, GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., is one of the leading global providers of financing programs for commercial property real estate. The Horsham, Pa.-based company provides loans ranging from property acquisition and construction to refinancing and renovation for properties such as general office, industrial, retail, apartments and healthcare. The worldwide operation processes hundreds of thousands of documents at its 60 regional locations throughout the U.S. and at office sites in Europe.

To streamline the processing of loan documents and to provide access to these documents to employees in an anytime/anywhere operating scenario, the commercial mortgage group instituted a distributed document capture system with the goal of shifting to an electronic document processing operation. Kofax Capture is a key component of the company's paperless objective, performing critical document and data capture tasks and, as a result, significantly enhancing the company's commercial loan process.

The Challenge

Each day GMAC Commercial Mortgage processes more than 100,000 loan documents related to a wide assortment of income-producing properties. As the largest commercial mortgage underwriter in the U.S., the company elected to improve overall operating efficiency by consolidating its documentation processing at a single location. The company handles a variety of document types, including Excel spreadsheets, email text, Acrobat PDFs and AS/400-generated reports.

"We have 60 origination offices servicing 47,000 loans and are the largest providers of Fanny Mae, Freddy Mac and FHA loans," said Larry Hoffman, GMAC Commercial Mortgage director of imaging and workflow. "We also provide escrow administration, client relations, asset administration and service monitoring, payment processing, risk management and investor and IRS reporting."

Prior to implementing a document capture solution with Kofax Capture, the company stored information in both electronic and paper formats which exacerbated the difficulties with document search and retrieval.

"GMAC Commercial Mortgage processes 3,591 document types and 30 different index fields, making it a very complicated document management environment," Hoffman said. "Today, 90 percent of all documents received are scanned the same day with less than 24-hour turnaround."

The Solution

GMAC Commercial Mortgage deployed Kofax Capture, a flexible scanning and automated indexing solution for documents, at locations worldwide. Kofax Capture is the foundation for Kofax's strategy to help organizations streamline business processes. The solution included: Kofax Capture, the world's leading automated information capture platform and Kofax Transformation Modules (KTM), which streamline the transformation of business documents into structured electronic information by automating the processes of document classification and data extraction.

The Kofax solution automatically identifies forms and performs highly accurate recognition of handwriting (ICR), machine print (OCR), check marks (OMR) and barcodes to extract even the toughest data from scanned images. Kofax Capture manages the process, indexes and validates the captured content, and then releases it seamlessly through a library of custom integration modules developed for all major document and content management systems.

Kofax Capture enables GMAC Commercial Mortgage to move paper documents from its remote offices directly to the company's central workflow system without incurring the time and cost of shipping hard-copy documents. The company centrally administers remote scan locations and schedules data transfer in off-peak hours to better leverage available network bandwidth. With the Kofax solution, GMAC Commercial Mortgage can capture and index content from the company's imaging centers in Horsham; San Francisco; Pasadena, Calif.; Chicago; New York; Vienna, Va.; Richmond, Va.; Birmingham, Ala.; Mullingar,  Ireland and Paris, France.

GMAC Commercial Mortgage paired Kofax Capture with Hyland Software's OnBase, which serves as the enterprise software framework that combines document imaging, COLD/ERM, document management, and workflow into a single Web-enabled application.

GMAC Commercial Mortgage also found Kofax Capture's easy-to-use customization features highly beneficial in creating an integrated document and data management solution to meet their enterprise requirements. The customization features make it easy for GMAC Commercial Mortgage to react to changes in the document management environment.

The Results

With the implementation of Kofax Capture, GMAC Commercial Mortgage is now processing more than 16 million pages electronically per year. Document imaging technology enables the company to process loan documents more quickly, usually within 24 hours. Thanks to document imaging technology, GMAC Commercial Mortgage has achieved tremendous payoffs in loan processing speed and operational efficiency, Hoffman said.