Countrywide Property Lawyers expect payback of £850,000
investment in Visualfiles and SOS systems in the first year
As Europe's largest conveyancing operation, Countrywide Property
Lawyers (CPL) have invested in a £850,000 upgrade of their
case management system from Visualfiles and practice management
solution from SOS to improve client services, create competitive
advantage and future proof the operation in what looks set to
become a tumultuous market. Their confident expectation is that
this upgrade will be paid for within the first year of implementation.
The Background
Countrywide Plc initially purchased SolCase v5 and SOS’ practice
management software back in 1997 to facilitate the rapid set
up of CPL, their new conveyancing arm which would complement
the already well established estate agency, surveyors and financial
services divisions. Terry Marris (Chairman, CPL) comments “What
followed was three years of significant growth. However in 2001,
as a result of this growth, our need for more advanced automatic
workflow functionality and connectivity to other systems became
imperative. There were 2 obvious options – either a bespoke
or a system package route. Having researched the market, we selected
one of Europe’s largest IT services companies to provide
a fully managed IT services contract including the supply of
a bespoke case management system.” CPL migrated the bespoke
system, known internally as Fusion, between 2002 and 2004, with
SolCase v5 still running in tandem. However, it soon became apparent
that it was failing to meet their capacity requirements as 40%
of their 100,000 cases per annum were being outsourced to a panel
of law firms for completion and by early 2005 less than 30% of
cases were being processed through Fusion. Terry adds “At
this point Visualfiles became the Plan B pending the final performance
tests on Fusion. While we did evaluate other suppliers, Visualfiles
was the obvious choice due to its market leading position, the
reliability and high regard for SolCase v5 and a separate successful
implementation in our re-mortgage business in 2004. We identified
that Fusion would not scale to the number of users without a
complete re-build of the application and SQL server database
and we viewed the Visualfiles alternative to be a lot less expensive
and a much faster route with higher probability of success.”
Key Requirements
Ultimately, system requirements were geared around future proofing
their technology in order to provide a continuously high level
of client service. The experience that they had gained enabled
them to define a very clear system specification. Visualfiles
met and in some cases exceeded their expectations. Key requirements
included:
• Scalability: For CPL, their expansion opportunity was
represented by the number of transactions that they could complete
without having to outsource the business. To ensure that the
Visualfiles product could meet their scalability requirements,
CPL engaged SQS, the UK’s leading independent testing consultancy,
to work with Visualfiles and Progress Software (the platform
on which Visualfiles software runs) to carry out a benchmarking
exercise. On this exercise, Marris states “We needed to
know that the new system would cater for 700 concurrent users
(across our distributed offices at Manchester, Northampton & Cardiff).
We should not have worried! The original aim of having 1,000
new instructions processed within a 3 hour period was greatly
exceeded reaching a phenomenal 2,300 cases with 700 users. The
benchmarking process demonstrated that Visualfiles is both robust
and scalable and we knew that Visualfiles could meet our future
plans for growth.”
• Flexibility: This covered a wide spectrum for CPL. CPL
needed to be able to adapt the system to their ever changing
needs, quickly and without fuss. But in addition system flexibility
covered the ability for Visualfiles to fully integrate with the
rest of the industry to enable CPL to avail themselves of commercial
opportunities (search integration, Land Registry (the Chain Matrix
and e conveyancing) and HMRC (HM’s Revenue and Customs – SDLT
forms). Visualfiles’ very active and visionary involvement
in preparation for these market changes cemented CPL’s
decision. Marris adds “While scalability and flexibility
were the 2 key requirements, Visualfiles also satisfied our need
for process automation of routine tasks, automatic case inception
and e-mail integration with Outlook. The seamless integration
between Visualfiles and SOS was also essential. In addition we
are firm believers that people make the company and we were very
impressed throughout our various dealings with Visualfiles staff.”
Future Ambitions and Growth Plans
Live since March 2006, following a swift five month implementation,
CPL have very ambitious but achievable growth plans:
• Improved client service and reduced case length: While
a typical transaction can take between 12 – 13 weeks, using
Visualfiles CPL’s goal is to reduce this to less than 10
weeks – providing a more efficient service to clients.
• 300% increase in capacity: CPL envisage that capacity
will treble from 10,000 active cases at any one time to 30,000
in 3 year’s time.
• Increased Revenue: CPL currently generate in the region
of £22m with 10,000 active cases at any one time. A threefold
increase will not only triple the opportunity but also with heightened
functionality it should also have a positive impact on profitability.
• Ahead of the pack for e conveyancing: While CPL currently
provide online access to clients, this area will be one of the
first deliverables of the project. CPL will expose much more
of the detail around a case to external audiences and will build
their linkages with third parties. They see PISCES as being central
to defining the technological playing field and are heartened
to see the leading role Visualfiles is taking. Whilst much of
the detail around e conveyancing remains unclear, they are comfortable
that Visualfiles will provide the technology ‘wrapper’ within
which CPL will build their processes. Richard Hinton, Head of
Residential Property at Visualfiles comments “CPL are out
and out conveyancing pioneers. They have consistently taken bold,
innovative steps to revolutionise the industry and we are delighted
that it is our software that is powering their ambition.” Marris
summarises “For us, providing a quick and efficient service
to clients is our most important company goal. Our investment
in systems from market leading suppliers Visualfiles and SOS
provides a robust and scalable infrastructure to continuously
improve our product offering. While I anticipate many changes
over the coming year, I have no doubt that we have selected the
best systems to allow a speedy response to anything that is thrown
our way!”
