L@W has focused on the conveyancing procedure property registration process in South Africa, where it allows various stakeholders to exchange data electronically. The conveyancing process is a complex process both legally and administratively and refers to all the work associated with transferring the legal ownership of real estate from one owner to another. The process consists of many sub-processes that can either be performed individually or are linked to other procedures within the process.

L@W currently works with South Africa’s largest financial institutions and over 2,000 law firms around the country – about 80% of all mortgage registrations are being processed via its secure platform. The company guarantees confidentiality and privacy through the effective use of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that enables digital certificates for authentication for its customers that subscribe.

Although the company has been very successful in enabling organizations to exchange critical information and data through its trusted third party platform, it wanted to make sure it was keeping up with market conditions and increasing client requirements by taking the business to a new level and moving away from simply switching information around. The company wanted to deploy a system that would enable it to manage business processes more intelligently and ultimately help with broadening the scope of its service offerings and value add.

L@W had a homegrown system in place that was used to switch messages between various clients but it was only able to process work on a very small scale. It was also difficult to maintain and complicated when needing to change items in the process.

The company set out to identify a Business Process Management (BPM) vendor that could effectively manage its complex processes and give it a cross-industry view with the ability to automate endless processes. Following a thorough review of over 6 vendors, L@W narrowed the list down to three that met its key requirements. Requirements included a process design tool for business analysts, a solution that was flexible and enabled rapid process changes and was adaptable to different industries, the ability to integrate with other solutions and to handle high volumes and multiple processes and most importantly a solution that supported PKI.

Metastorm and its Alliance Partner, DVT were selected as the preferred vendors and an in-depth product workshop which included a technical and functional analysis, was conducted. Ultimately Metastorm BPM® was selected as the vendor of choice to help L@W develop its next generation of automated solutions.

Today, Metastorm BPM is being used as the foundation of a business process outsourced offering for property registration. This critical process offering is comprised of 3 key functions:

Bond Cancellation – the procedure that manages the cancellation of a registered bond when a property is sold so property can be transferred to the new buyer.

Bond Registration – the process that registers all appropriate legal documentation on a bond before a loan is funded.

Transfer of Property Ownership – the transferring of property ownership from one legal entity to another.

These high-level functions are initiated by external clients and within these three processes are a whole host of sub-processes that are orchestrated and managed in the background. Metastorm BPM is also integrated with internal and external databases that pull necessary information to help with the completion of required forms. With its PKI integration, control is passed over to Metastorm once client credentials are checked against the L@W user database.

L@W has always been known for guaranteeing confidentiality and privacy when exchanging critical information but using Metastorm BPM, the company has added a new layer of automation with the ability to correctly route and notify appropriate parties at the proper stage in the process about confidential information that is being shared.

Metastorm BPM has given L@W the ability to adapt to changes as needed and provide a global view of process status information – abilities that were limited with its homegrown system. It is also now equipped with a solution to automate endless processes across a variety of industries with the ability to develop powerful applications very rapidly and in a fraction of the time required by other applications.

L@W has been extremely pleased with its implementation and expects that Metastorm will be a major pillar of the organization well into the future. Metastorm BPM will be combined with other technologies to continue enhancing the company’s conveyancing process to all of its clients, in addition to combining it with a document management solution and other complementary technologies. The company has a three year strategic goal in place and expects that by 2009, 85% of the South African market will use this process.

The company has also purchased Metastorm Envision and plans to use the product to model and simulate processes for its largest clients to help with identifying bottlenecks and analyzing performance.

Metastorm is giving L@W the ability to develop highly innovative mission-critical solutions, hosted in a BPO model, with a rapid time to market.