BankAtlantic has dramatically improved efficiency through a new document repository, and an automated flood certification system that replaced a manual process that sometimes took as long as a week.

What’s more, the bank was able to acquire the technology and training to complete the two separate projects in part through renewing its Enterprise Agreement with the Microsoft Volume Licensing Program, amortizing payments over three years and taking advantage of training and consulting credits.

The new document management system, called PolicyLink, was built using Sharepoint Portal Server 2003, Active Directory and Exchange Server 2003. It is used daily by all of the bank’s employees. The old system tagged documents as required reading for certain audiences and then tracked and confirmed who had read them, but the user interface was cumbersome and sometimes when employees entered a keyword to search the database, the search came up empty even though the document was there.

PolicyLink provides the functionality of the old system, but is much easier to use and therefore has helped employees expand the uses for it.

“We were able to recreate the capability of delivering designated, must-read policies to all employees or selected audiences, and to ensure recipients acknowledge receipt and review of the document,” said Jim Trautwein, the bank’s CIO. But  PolicyLink has become a solution that all employees can turn to when they have a question.

“To a large extent it is becoming our corporate knowledge base and with its robust search engine, people are finding what they need to know when they need to know it,” he said.

Employees have also begun to use it to share information generated by different individuals, teams and departments.

Meanwhile, a BizTalk 2004-based solution for automating the flood certification on homes used as collateral for a loan has become much more efficient. The manual process could take as long as a week. The new automated flood certification workflow quickly initiates and finalizes the necessary documents for each loan. The BizTalk Server automates the processes of requesting information from the customer, verifying with the insurance company and updating BankAtlantic’s records to ensure that each loan has appropriate insurance.