Key Results
Background
MegaLoans was capped at about 800 rate locks a month. Appraisals took 10 calendar days, and loan officers and processors couldn’t move a file forward until the appraisal came back. Their pipelines stayed full of stalled loans, so they had no room for new clients.
Finding the bottleneck
I talked with operations, underwriting, and secondary to understand where loans were getting stuck. All three groups pointed at the same place. Appraisal speed decided how fast loan officers and processors could clear their pipelines, and that decided how many new loans the company could take.
The goal was 2,000 locks a month. I worked with engineering on a design, sized the revenue the extra volume would bring in, and used that to get leadership to prioritize the work.
What we changed
The old process was built on tasks. People ordered appraisals, chased status, and collected information by hand.
We rebuilt it around data. Each manual task became a data collection step. If we could get the data from another source, the system pulled it and nobody had to do it by hand. Underwriters also got a clear view of the most important thing to work on next, instead of digging through their queues.
Results
- Appraisal turnaround fell from 10 days to 3.
- Monthly capacity grew from 800 rate locks to 2,000.
- With automation and a prioritized queue, underwriters could handle up to 10 times the volume they managed before.
What I learned
The appraisal vendors weren’t the real constraint. The constraint was how much of the process depended on a person doing a task. Once the data came in on its own and underwriters knew what to work on next, the whole pipeline sped up.