Lender's Commitment to Excellence Extends to Mission-critical Apps

You don't become the largest, fastest-growing, independent mortgage lender in the Southeast by resting on your laurels. It takes 100 percent commitment from each and every team member to get the job done. Thus, high-performing applications, available on demand, are paramount. To this end, HomeBanc relies on Vantage and QACenter Performance Edition from Compuware.

HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation has experienced a tremendous rate of growth (15 to 20 percent) since the time it became an independent lender more than three years ago. Committed to providing customers with outstanding service, the company is the only mortgage lender offering a customer service guarantee—if you are not satisfied with the loan process, HomeBanc will refund the application fee.

IT in a Fast-paced Environment

Diego Frausto, senior vice president of information technology, describes what it's like to be in charge of an IT department for a company in the midst of tremendous growth: "Running an IT department in a fast-paced environment is very difficult and has impacted the way we do business. We have to plan all of our maintenance and rollouts around the growth itself."

The mortgage industry is a seasonal one. The first quarter and the beginning of the fourth quarter are typically the slow periods, so Frausto and his team must plan all their upgrades and maintenance schedules during these times. "It's crucial that we try to minimize the impact of any maintenance or upgrades during the second, third and end of the fourth quarter because the volume of loans coming in during that time frame is phenomenal," he says.

Vantage Helps Ensure Application Availability

Vantage saved us half a million dollars in unnecessary memory upgrades and from rolling out a product to our sales force that would have negatively impacted our credibility. —Diego Frausto, Senior Vice President, Information Technology HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation

HomeBanc Way II is the adopted project name given to a loan origination application that has been in development at HomeBanc since January 2004. The application is intended to streamline the loan process for loan officers and help put customers in the right loan product. "Ensuring that the loan officer has a good experience whenever they utilize applications that we are providing for them is crucial for us," Frausto continues.  "It is extremely frustrating when you are slowed down by an application not functioning correctly."

Frausto and his team rely on the Vantage application service management solution to help ensure that the programs they're getting ready to roll out are efficient and don't impede the performance of the sales force. "Just yesterday, we were getting ready to roll out a new release of our loan software and there was a particular transaction that was taking around two minutes to complete," says Nate Hayward, QA director. "We used Vantage to identify the problem in 15 minutes. Without Vantage, it probably would have taken us half the day."

"We were able to pinpoint the problem right away and work with developers to correct it and make that application more efficient for our loan officers," Hayward continues. "It was a real feather in our cap." Frausto adds, "The last time we upgraded an application, we didn't have Vantage or the ability to view trace information being sent back to us. It took us two to three weeks to figure out why the application was slow."

Improved Communication Between Work Groups

Both Frausto and Hayward agree that Vantage has improved the communication within IT. "Yesterday, we had one of the testers in the room with us and could show her the trace data we were looking at. She came up with a resolution almost immediately," says Hayward. "In the future, I'm looking forward to being able to send Vantage reports to the developers and saying, 'This is where the bottleneck is and what are we going to do to fix the problem?'"

Hayward sees the product's ease of use and the readability of its reports as a definite plus. "Vantage really outperforms the competition. It gives you more capabilities, it's easier to implement, and the learning curve that goes along with how to use it versus its competitors is like night and day. You don't need to be a Ph.D. to interpret Vantage reports," he affirms.

"With Vantage," Frausto adds, "we can pinpoint a problem and ask the developers to take a look at it. It really stops the fingerpointing that goes on."

Preventing an Unnecessary Upgrade

Having Vantage paid off big for HomeBanc when Frausto and his team considered implementing a vendor's Customer Relationship Management tool. "We were experiencing some problems with application performance when we tried to get a pilot group launched," says Frausto. One of the developers suggested upgrading each of the 650 user laptops involved to 1 gig of memory to solve the problem. "That," says Frausto, "would have been a huge expense."

Instead, Frausto relied on Vantage to see where the problem existed. "We determined that it was a back-end authentication problem our users were experiencing—all the memory in the world wouldn't have solved the problem," he says. "Vantage saved us half a million dollars in unnecessary memory upgrades and from rolling out a product to our sales force that would have negatively impacted our credibility." The vendor recognized the problem as a critical fault in its software and is now actively working to correct the issue.

QACenter Performance Edition Assures Applications Perform Under Stress

Hayward and his team use Compuware QACenter Performance Edition to test performance and run applications against database and application servers to see how the servers will react to the load at peak times. "It allows us to define and certify that the applications we're getting ready to roll out will work efficiently in our infrastructure," he says. "Before we had QACenter, it was a very manual process trying to figure out what the breaking points would be. The tool has really taken the guesswork out of the equation and gives us concrete evidence that we're putting the correct infrastructure in place."

HomeBanc puts its faith in Vantage and QACenter to help IT deliver useful, high-performing applications that help employees get the job done. "As we continue to develop our own loan origination application, we'll use Vantage and QACenter to be certain we release quality applications," Frausto concludes.