Allied
Mortgage
Home Mortgage & Capital Corporation
Client
Profile
Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corporation is the largest U.S.
privately held mortgage banker/broker, with offices in 49 states,
Guam and the Virgin Islands. Allied's development of over 700
investors with several thousand programs and innovative
partnerships have allowed it to deliver customized products to each
borrower. Combined with the energy of branch managers who have the
freedom to respond to local market conditions, Allied has
experienced sequential double-digit growth since it was founded in
1991.
Executive
Summary
As financial services provider, Allied is required to comply with
the Gramm-Lleach-Bliley Act (GLBA) Safeguard Rule addressing the
Administrative, Physical and Technical security requirements for
their corporate environment. Additionally, Allied‟s distributed
work force and decentralized infrastructure included a mix of NT
and 2000 servers, Exchange and other email platforms, as well as
numerous disparate databases and applications that are used to run
the business. There was no common, central means of authenticating
all users for central policy management and technical controls, and
no common data repository that held ALL of the key data in one
place. Added to the existing infrastructure challenges and
regulatory requirements is the fact that Allied‟s growth requires a
continuous process of hiring new employees to staff branch office
locations across the country. Organizations that are constantly
hiring new employees find that it is, indeed, a hiring
"process."
There are many steps along the way with an increasing need for due diligence in hiring as well as ensuring compliance with ever increasing government regulations. Many people and departmental processes are involved including the hiring manager, human resources, payroll, IT, facilities, etc. The process itself is manually intensive, adding to corporate overhead. Errors and delays in the process bring other tangible and intangible costs, including:
• The new employee who can‟t work
because they don‟t have a login or email yet
• Hiring the wrong employee when HR didn‟t complete a required
background check
• Losing a strong candidate to the competition when you couldn‟t
react quickly enough
• Government fines when regulations aren‟t followed
• Lawsuits when new hires aren‟t properly informed of company
policy
• Network misuse and security lapses through improperly trained
employees
According to CIO David Langston, "The extensive geographical distribution of our origination offices coupled with the delegation of hiring authority to local managers provided an initial obstacle to the establishment of a centralized repository for policy distribution and compliance. Identity management was the critical issue - the majority of our employees do not authenticate into our network security system."
In support of this effort, Allied commissioned DYONYX to provide an encompassing baseline assessment to document the administrative, physical and technical safeguards that GLBA requires. Once the assessment was completed, DYONYX was well positioned to assist Allied with a prioritized set of related service solutions that included Process Optimization, Process automation via Custom Applications Development, Secure Active Directory migration design, plan and implementation, and policy management solution through its Premiere Status Partnership with NetIQ.
Solution
DYONYX, first traced, mapped and optimized those processes related
to hiring and creating accounts for new employees. DYONYX then
automated this new process by creating a web based front end that
would streamline the hiring process and utilize web forms for
collaboration between the branches and corporate Human Resources
department. Sub-sets of current employees were migrated using
NetIQ's DMA tool into the Active Directory forest. Employees
without standard network login accounts from various databases were
correlated into a central repository using a custom script, then
given AD user accounts in a special AD domain so that they would
also authenticate to Vigelent Policy Center.
Net IQ‟s Vigelent Policy Center (VPC), a leading web based software tool that provides companies with the ability to publish, distribute and track policy compliance across the enterprise, was selected as the primary policy management tool. Due to Allied‟s complex environment, however, there was no common, central means of authenticating all users with VPC. Using different authentication methods would have negated VPC's centralized reporting capabilities and require running/supporting several instances of VPC.
David Langston came up with a solution that would ultimately solve this problem as well as further streamline the entire hiring process. The solution was a custom web based application that DYONYX designed that would come to be known as the Applicant Processing System or APS, which leverages the abilities of VPC and automates nearly every step of the hiring process. APS automates the steps from the point where a hiring manager decides that an applicant will be a good fit for the organization to having a productive new employee who is informed of all company policies, receiving a paycheck, logging in to the organizations network and receiving email.
APS is a secure, browser-based application accessible to appropriate organization staff and to potential new hires. Approved hiring managers enter the information for a potential new hire. The new hire is granted access via a user ID and secure password to Net IQ‟s Vigelent Policy Center. Once the new hire has verified their personal information and passed any evaluations required in VPC, HR is notified. The hiring manager can see in the hiring manager APS control panel exactly where candidates are in the hiring process. This system was further customized to automatically provide the hiring manager an exact list of required corporate and government forms in every state that Allied operates in, as well as downloadable access to those forms. Hiring managers no longer wade through unneeded forms and are provided those that are specifically required for each specific employee, including employee type, hiring location (state and country) and applicants residence.
Now, an applicant must have read and agreed to all organization policies before HR is involved in the process. Once the hiring manager and applicant have completed their part of the process, HR is automatically notified of the pending hire. HR completes each pre-hiring function (such as background checks) and indicates in APS whether the new hire is approved or disapproved. The HR APS control panel allows HR staff to see the status of current applicant at any time. The hiring manager is notified automatically once the HR process is complete.
After HR approval, APS can automatically create a network login id conforming to Allied‟s organization standards as well as a secure password and email address. Employee information is transmitted for import into the organizations HR tracking system and payroll systems. IT staff do not have to touch the process.
Key Benefits
The DYONYX APS/VPC solution reduces the overall time required to
complete the new hire process by approximately one week per new
hire. Additionally, this improved efficiency dramatically reduces
the number of staff members needed to process a new, network
enabled employee, and guarantees that all new hires have been
informed of and signed off on organization policies and are
properly populated into required organizational systems (such as
payroll and HR systems) with the correct required employee
information.
According to David Langston, "The bottom line benefit results in much lower costs and decreased liability for any organization. We figure that we have gained an extra week of productivity for every new employee we hire. Add to that the fact that we no longer have to distribute new hire and policy binders at $12 per overnight package and the hard cost savings alone amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year."
Optimizing the process prior to solving the problem with technology provided significant time and cost savings for everyone involved. The web-enabled automation streamlined the time lag of HR to Branch Manager communications and provided cost savings of not having to send and track new hire paperwork to the remote locations. Building a repository to pull the required data from the disparate data sources allows Allied to easily add, move or change employees and departments with native AD functionality.
The end benefit allowed Allied to utilize all of the benefits of VPC in an environment where it probably would not have been a fit out of the box. "The automatic enrollment of candidates required some innovative collaboration between DYONYX, NetIQ and Microsoft. It became a common occurrence in our project meetings to hear, "This is something Microsoft hasn‟t done with Active Directory before," said Langston.
As final validation to Langston‟s original vision and execution of the described integrated solution, the Government Technology Conference (GTC) awarded the DYONYX/NetIQ Team with it‟s Best Solution Award in October of 2003 at their 15th Annual Conference.
To learn more, visit www.dyonyx.com
