Online mortgage loan marketplace LendingTree says it has already seen tremendous value from a business intelligence solution implemented this summer that allows the company to better track its market and make more decisions based on up-to-date metrics.

The company began looking for BI solutions because of the competitiveness of the mortgage industry as well as the industry’s climate in which fluctuations in the interest rates, changes in economic policies and news events can all impact business.

“We are striving for quicker access to information that the business can act upon,” said Lei Fu, vice president of business applications.

The company’s information services team targeted the operations and sales segments of the business for the first phase implementation of a BI solution from Decision Support Panel (DSP), a vendor that creates business data overview portals in Microsoft SharePoint environments.

The solution involved Decision Support Panel’s DSP Portal Edition BI Portal Solution as well as Microsoft SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services, SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 and DSP Portal Edition 4.3. Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003 are also used by the solution.

Developers found the transition to be easy due to the familiarity of Microsoft products as well as the products’ consistent look and feel. The implementation took seven months and the learning curve at project launch took three.

The solution has provided LendingTree with much quicker access to information while also making the information much easier to work with by allowing business users to slice and dice information in ways that it is relevant to them.

The solution “provided us with a competitive edge versus the rest of the industry,” said Fu.