Enterprise Application - Transactions for Real Estate

Description

The customer is a fast-growing online brokerage in the USA. Since the start of the project, they have done all of their collaboration in the cloud. They even have a full-fledged digital environment that they use to gather and do meetings. Until now, they were always using off the shelf applications that would fit their business processes to some extent. However, customizing and maintaining those applications took a lot of hours, which was not efficient. To fix that problem and to have a solid platform that can facilitate their own rapid growth, they chose to build a custom application with Mendix. Mansystems' role is to guide them into the beautiful world of Mendix and help set up a solid base on which they eventually can develop further. Mansystems assists with the architecture and defining their business process within the Mendix application. 

The customer needed to face fast growing and multiple systems.

General Information

Business Need: The customer is a fast-growing online brokerage in the USA. Since the start of the project, they have done all of their collaboration in the cloud. They even have a full-fledged digital environment that they use to gather and do meetings. Until now, they were always using off the shelf applications that would fit their business processes to some extent. However, customizing and maintaining those applications took a lot of hours, which was not efficient. To fix that problem and to have a solid platform that can facilitate their own rapid growth, they chose to build a custom application with Mendix. Mansystems' role is to guide them into the beautiful world of Mendix and help set up a solid base on which they eventually can develop further. Mansystems assists with the architecture and defining their business process within the Mendix application. 

The customer needed to face fast growing and multiple systems.

Solution: The solution had to solve the permanent growth in number of agents. Some days growth is even faster than 5 to 10 agents daily. The old systems required logging into multiple databases in order to add an agent to the various systems. The customer also has agents leaving the company and those same agents need to be removed from those same various systems.
The real estate developed platforms that exist today generally do not play well with each other and none of them are centrally managed.
That means, the customer needed a solution that covers several workflows. For example the agent onboarding: A various checklist was needed relative to onboarding and offboarding. Not only logging into multiple databases to add an agent was time consuming and frustrating, but there was also an inconsistent broker review and approval process for joining agents. The customer needed to keep accurate agent records, payplans and documents as well as needed to convert and report joining agents.
Also, integrations to the financing department in order to create invoices belonging to the correct agents were needed. 
Furthermore, transactions had to be managed. There had to be submission for broker review and the closing of the transaction to getting an agent and the company paid. Therefore, a complex variety of transaction commission scenarios had to be handled. Remittance instructions needed to be generated and printed or mailed. However, many settled transactions require post-settlement fixes. 

The administration department has to be able to stay in control of all of these transactions and processes. They need to manage company configuration for the many application processes. Adequate controls need to be in place in order to safeguard financial data. 

If the financial data is not safeguarded correctly, the company will lose money as all the processes are linked to each other.
 

Results: By using the Mendix platform, Mansystems developed a custom application; a single platform to accommodate the fast permanent growth and consolidated systems. The customer is now able to view all agents with checklists in one single location. In general, most of the processes are now automated and much easier to handle. Joining agents are auto-assigned for broker approval and assigning payplans as well as uploading agent documents can be done much faster with the developed Mendix app. Also, approving and converting new joining agents is a piece of cake.
Because of the interface to Intacct, the finance department can now create and synchronize agent records. They can easily and quickly create agent invoices in Intacct, because in Mendix all important data has been synchronized beforehand. Requests for changed agent financial records can be approved and also the equity program and awards can be imported.
But Mansystems did not only build an interface to Intacct, we also integrated SkySlope so that all updates can be taken into account. Now, disbursement instructions can be sent out and notifications are received, if there have been any transaction changes. Furthermore, a transaction can be settled and even a settled transaction can be corrected.
Even though there have been many releases up until now, the customer wants to go on with the project and add more and more functionalities to the existing custom application. A project that started with only a few consultants, has been growing steadily. Next to developers, testers and managers were added to the team so that the whole developer team consisted of dedicated experts. The customer is 100 % satisfied and wants to keep working with Mansystems, because by using the developed Mendix app, all customer's business processes could be improved and by saving time, a lot of effort could be avoided. That also means cost savings.