When Georgina Castañeda tried to get a loan to purchase a car, several financial institutions turned her away. For Ms. Castañeda, having reliable transportation is the key to a higher standard of living. After discovering the Ways to Work program, Ms. Castañeda was able to get a car loan and she is now the proud owner of a mini-van. Buying a mini-van has improved her family's life tremendously and she has been inspired to tell others about the program. Now that she has a reliable car, she saves two hours on her daily commute time and has increased her income by finding full-time employment. In Georgina's words, "Life has become a lot easier." She finds the people at San Mateo Credit Union (SMCU) very helpful and with her higher income has opened savings accounts there for herself and her daughter, as well as an IRA. Thanks to the money she saved in her account, this past Christmas Georgina took her children on their first vacation ever ... to Disneyland. According to Georgina, "I always dreamed of taking the kids there but never would have thought I could do it alone. Thank you SMCU and Ways to Work—you changed my life."
Milwaukee-based Ways to Work provide their loan program through more than 30 social service programs, such as SMCU, nationally. Through Ways to Work, these programs offer their clients access to low-interest financing for vehicles. For many of these clients, reliable transportation can make the difference between having a job and being unemployed. Clients, who are often unqualified with other financing institutions and/or exposed to predatory loan practices, find hope through Ways to Work. Each year Ways to Work affiliates issue more than a thousand loans to low-income families. One of the secrets to the success of the Ways to Work program has to do with information management. Good information management means better information and faster processing, which translates to better quality of service for their clients.
In the spring of 2009, Ways to Work started looking for a new information management software solution. While their existing solution, a Microsoft Access database, had certainly served its purpose; it was time to replace this ten-year-old technology. The old system ran locally at each provider agency and data was uploaded monthly to a central database server, but the model presented several challenges. First, maintaining the system required a lot of resources. Since Ways to Work’s customers are independent social services agencies, Ways to Work has no input on IT requirements for these clients. As such, supporting 30-plus individual installs on a variety of versions of Windows and with a variety of computers, proved a major headache. Another major issue was the fact that data was not being input in real-time as applicants applied for loans. Loan officers would typically wait until the end of the month, enter all the loan applications at once, and then submit the data to the central office. At the Ways to Work office this was a problem because they would not have real-time access to the data, not to mention the headaches involved in synchronizing input from over 30 different providers. During the last ten years after their old system was originally developed, we have seen a complete change in web-based applications, and the timing of the release of RiteTrack4 couldn’t have been better for Ways to Work.
In selecting their next solution, Ways to Work had several key requirements:
• A centralized web-based solution
• A solution that leaves minimum footprint on the client computer (due to the great variety of software, hardware, and bandwidth among provider agencies)
• A security model that can meet the strictest requirements for financial data as dictated by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley act of 1999.
To select a new system, Ways to Work started with 15 vendors and narrowed the field down to five finalists who each did a live, web presentation. Says Robert Cacace, CIO for Families International (Ways to Work’s holding company); “We wanted all of our provider agencies to be in on the selection process. Each vendor was therefore asked to do a web presentation where both staff from Ways to Work’s central office, and representatives from the provider agencies participated.” Jeff Faulkner, President of Ways to Work says, “After the demonstrations Handel came out as the clear leader. Although there were other vendors who specialized in banking software, Handel demonstrated how quickly RiteTrack could be configured into a system that would meet our needs. In the end the choice was very easy for us.” Robert Cacace adds: “The references really sealed the deal. We had asked for a happy reference, an unhappy reference, and a reference from somebody who ran into challenges during implementation. The responses we received from these references really confirmed our choice.”
Ways to Work started working with Handel in August 2009 and went live on January 1, 2010. “This has been one of the fastest implementations I have ever seen,” says Robert Cacace. “When we first discussed going live January 1, I thought to myself that would never happen. They proved me wrong. The staff at Handel was not just extremely responsive to our needs. They truly bent over backward to deliver a working system on time and on budget.”
Ways to Work can quickly look at the status of a loan application through the RiteTrack progress-bar control.
In short, RiteTrack allows case managers around the country to enter loan applications into RiteTrack and manage the entire loan process from start to finish. The RiteTrack security model ensures that specific agencies can only see the loans that they process. As such, RiteTrack offers the best of both worlds: A centralized model that makes the loan management process much easier for Ways to Work with a localized security model that protects the client loan data. “With RiteTrack we allow the software to become a program-management tool, rather than just a data-entry tool,” says Wendell Willis, Chief Operating Officer at Ways to Work. Mr. Willis says he has already had sites tell him that RiteTrack is having a positive change on the way that they run their entire program.
Perhaps the most important thing to us is knowing that RiteTrack is allowing more low-income families faster access to reliable transportation, which in turn allows them to increase their earnings. At Handel our focus has always been on helping our customers provide better services to their clients. We are honored to be working with Ways to Work in helping them realize this goal.
Click here to learn more about how Ways to Work use RiteTrack
Click here to learn more about Ways to Work.