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Leeds Building Society is the UK's 5th largest building society with assets of £9.9 billion, almost 700,000 members and 65 branches in the UK. The Society is always looking to enhance its procedures and systems and over recent years Arena's mstore software for electronic document management (EDM), has provided tangibly successful results to help it match that ethos.

Tim Lancelot, Software Solutions Manager, sets the scene regarding Arena's long-standing partnership with the Society: "We have worked with Leeds Building Society since 2004, delivering projects in support of the in-house IT team. Our aims have always been to improve customer service, control information, reduce costs and ease compliance.

FASTER MORTGAGES
Initially Arena were called upon to assist specifically with the mortgage application process. The society requires many documents including signed forms, proof of ID and so on. A constant flow of paper passed between branches, head office and the mortgage processing centre and all of it had to be matched to the mortgage application file. Arena's mstore solution automated the process, enabling documents to be called-up instantly on-screen by personnel at any LBS branch. The application processing time was reduced by 23%, to further improve customer service, whilst removing the paper also increased security and reduced errors.

MAILROOM EFFICIENCY
Arena recently deployed the society's second generation digital mailroom solution. This brings best of breed scanning hardware from OPEX together with Arena's mstore software to enable fast and accurate processing of incoming mail. Tim says; "We wanted to provide the fastest possible mailbag-to-desk process through automating as much of the process as possible."

Integration of the system with the society's core database systems is a central part of the mailroom identification and routing system. Incoming mail is scanned directly into mstore and attached to existing related data for quick reference on-screen by customer service operatives, as Tim Lancelot continues: "This places accurate information at the fingertips of staff responding to customer queries much earlier than was previously possible. LBS have the peace of mind of knowing that all documents are securely stored and can be activity audited as required by FSA guidelines. It is this commitment to leading edge efficiency solutions which has helped The Leeds to maintain an enviable asset to cost ratio within their sector."

TANGIBLE RESULTS
Paul Thompson, Document Services Manager at Leeds Building Society is delighted with the benefits of the system; "We set a three phase plan to test and run the overall electronic capture process and we can already see tangible and significant results of major impact. We have uploaded some 75% of legacy files whilst streamlining the intake of new material which amounts to approximately 5000 units per day. This has been done with minimal prep time and saving the physical transport and damage aspects of hard copies. It is truly fantastic technology with very few issues matched by easy operation and maintenance. I especially like the ability of the system to recognise types of documents. Furthermore it also recognises various optical character systems such as barcodes, OCR and OMR. Given that we have something like 700 different types of documents, the potential for fast and smooth processing is enormous. I am confident we will achieve an 18 month return on investment, which represents an outstanding success in truly 'moving the envelope', you might say!"
More info: www.arenagroup.net