Encompass from ICE Mortgage Technolgoy (formerly Ellie Mae) is an all-in-one mortgage management solution for lenders.
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Kofax TotalAgility
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Kofax TotalAgility brings cognitive capture capabilities to the hands of business analysts and non-technical users to solve content-centric challenges, including classification and extraction from financial documents, contracts, forms and other information-intensive documents. With it, the vendor says organizations can accelerate information intensive workflows by applying cognitive capture and artificial intelligence to unstructured data in order to automate and extract information and unlock…
ICE Mortgage Technology (Ellie Mae + Simplifile + MERS)
The system is great for loan origination and downline processing. The thing about Encompass is that it's only as good as its user so I can see where new loan originators or folks who are new to the system can have a huge disadvantage over somebody who is experienced with it. Of course, if you have experience with it it's the perfect tool. Compliance is also a big factor that Encompass does take advantage of. It communicates with various 3rd parties like Blend, appraisal management systems, Loanbeam, etc to help gather data where needed and keep files in compliance as needed. I don't know of any other case use for Encompass outside of loan origination.
The platform is an excellent solution for companies looking for a workflow automation system that can be used across departments and its return on investment becomes apparent once it is introduced in production for a business. Its ability to route work tasks dynamically between employees and outside parties, implement SLAs, and get information to a back-end source is excellent.
ICE Mortgage Technology (Ellie Mae + Simplifile + MERS)
The Web Center allows us to compete in our market and also allows us to continue to originate loans in markets where we don't have a physical originator.
The software is easy to use so it allows us to train staff very quickly so they can start producing mortgages.
I appreciate receiving information on upcoming updates well before they take place so that I can review the updates and inform the staff of changes they need to be aware of.
Ease of use. The drag and drop configuration to create the processes makes the product easy to use and configure. Most of the icons are intuitive on what they are and how to use them. The use of the colored icons for each value also helps to know that that value is looking for.
Forms. The capture forms are easy to create and maintain. A new field can be added to the Extraction group and then the capture form is regenerated and that field is automatically added to the form with all the proper attributes. If an additional check box or field is added to the form, that field stays when regenerated. This differs from KTA 6.0.
Kofax has done pretty well integrating all the pieces of Kofax into one product. KC (Kofax Capture), KIC (Kofax Import Connector), KTM (Kofax Transformation Module with OCR), and workflow are all combined into KTA (Kofax Total Agility). This lets all of these features work together in one product. Kofax does keep adding more to the functions that maybe were left out original version. This makes Kofax Total Agility a robust product.
ICE Mortgage Technology (Ellie Mae + Simplifile + MERS)
Encompass is a powerful tool that is flexible and can be set up to meet your business needs. However, a guide of best practices in designing a workflow process would be a huge resource.
A feature that would be helpful is the ability to easily create pop up boxes that could allow users to identify errors in data being entered in to fields and direct them to a solution to easily correct the error.
Exception management within the platform can certainly be improved upon. If a job is suspended for any particular issue integrations can be put in place to attempt to handle them but it is kludgy and does not always work as anticipated.
The administration interface is based on Microsoft Silverlight which limits it to certain versions of Internet Explorer and the interface has seen better days. Their other application, Kofax Kapow, has a much more mature and intuitive interface. This supposedly is being replaced in the next major iteration but I have doubts it will be successfully done.
The product is expensive. It is also the Cadillac of workflow platforms with document transformation built in. In many cases the product can do what you want it to do but there may be other more cost effective platforms.
ICE Mortgage Technology (Ellie Mae + Simplifile + MERS)
I am a long time user of Calyx software. I have loved using Calyx for most of my career. Early on, I did experience Encompass once and I felt it was too "management centric" at the time. After coming back to it now, I realize that my original feelings were more about distrust of my own management than the software itself.
Kofax TotalAgility is a beast of a package that gives you a thousand ways to tackle a problem, but it may not be the best platform for your needs. It is more of an enterprise platform that integrates well with other systems with moderate development time. Other packages may be cheaper, easier, and faster to implement depending on needs.
ICE Mortgage Technology (Ellie Mae + Simplifile + MERS)
Ellie Mae prepared itself well for TRID. We have been able to manage all of the changes using the configurable workflow to help all users understand the nuances of TRID.
We have gone paperless saving us time in transporting files between users and allowing us to reduce time to close.
Electronic signature of documents has allowed us to reach more borrowers.
Kofax TotalAgility is very expensive. Some customers have reported that using the KTA workflow has increased productivity and has a good ROI overall. The customers have not shared true numbers for me to give details.
