Our focus at xScion has always been to provide value to our clients. This is done by offering them the best possible solutions that address their most challenging and changing business needs. Our track record attests to this by the fact that our clients continue to use our services year after year. Please review the sample engagements listed below to learn more about what we can offer.
Business Process Reengineering/Business Analysis
Transactional Accounting: This team strives to streamline and enhance a myriad of legacy transactional accounting systems while meeting the monthly close the books deadlines, with the goal to enhance and shorten the monthly close cycle by incremental measurements over the next 12 months (i.e. 30 day, 22 day and 10 day close). Currently, it usually takes several weeks at the end of each month to reconcile every monthly accounting cycle accrued from legacy data systems that produce output in incompatible and manually created spreadsheets and the manual entry of reconciliations and manual journal entries to the GL. The group is also working to leverage the past investment in legacy applications with short-term automated applications in to order meet and comply with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) accounting principals and guidelines
xScion Duties: As Project Manager of this group, actively manage IT resources in collaboration with both the Business and Change Management groups in order to rework the reporting, reconciliation and journal entry efforts of the General Ledger. Also ensure that all project deadlines are met so as to provide the Business with technical solutions to meet their Close Process Improvement initiatives. This also involves overseeing analysis, development, and system testing of enhancements including automation and process reengineering, meeting and complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, adding automation to both clean up and close the past books. Additionally, apply and utilize the organization’s Technology Delivery model to ensure that established protocols and best practices are followed for each project.
Loan Servicing System: This application is the future platform for all mortgage sourcing and servicing functionality for this large, well known organization. It is a web-based system intended to replace several redundant legacy systems used for mortgage sourcing and servicing. The Servicing System includes loan payment processing for payments from the Servers as well as forecasts reported activity, tracks and reconciles actual reported activity, and tracks receivables from the Servicers. The Servicing System also tracks cash payments made from the Servicers.
xScion Duties: Responsible for managing multiple tasks including business modeling, requirements analysis, design, and test planning. Work products include Object models, Business Use Cases, Application Use Cases, Test Cases, and Design Deliverables developed using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Rational Unified Process (RUP). The Projects use an iterative “XP - lite” approach to project management.
Automated Watch List: The automated watch list was conceived and developed as a means to more closely monitor loan portfolios and assess which are of higher risk and should therefore be more closely monitored. The application consists of three main components: job scheduler, rules engine and the application core.
xScion Duties: The xScion team designed and implemented an XML-based lightweight rules engine to quickly and seamlessly change, add and remove business rules. Additionally, we designed and implemented a batch job scheduler for scheduling and running test jobs on a set of mortgages to decide the watch status. Our final task was to design and implement an infrastructure component for refreshing the contents of a configuration file across the nodes of a cluster. These tasks were completed using Java/J2EE, EJBs, Sybase, Weblogic 6.1, Win2k, Solaris and XML.
Performing Loans: The Performing Loans team is responsible for timely and accurate reporting for purchasing and servicing activity on Single Family loan portfolio (sold and retained loans). Primary customer is Corporate Accounting and External Reporting.
xScion Duties: Perform business analysis and business process reengineering through recommending and implementing automation and streamlining the process. Write requirements, interview internal accountants, understand the current process, define business requirements, and introduce new, more efficient processes. Also work with SME’s to make sure that all their needs are met and work with the development team to ensure that requirements are complete and understood.
Data Warehouse: At one of the GSEs, a major effort is underway to re-platform all the applications on the Multi-Family side of the business. This effort is necessary for a number of reasons. First, the current applications run in a number of environments and include a variety of data sources, which makes implementing changes or developing new offerings difficult. Second, with the implementation of Sarbanes-Oxley, more controls have to be added to the applications. The approach was to gather and integrate meaningful business data into one core database onto which applications could be built.
xScion Duties: Understand, gather, and integrate meaningful business data from debt, equity and bond businesses into one core database so it is accessible for business decision-making and other related analytical research and reporting. Also, serve as a liaison between the business users and systems personnel in communicating changes and enhancement to the database as well as consult with the business owner and business users to provide research and reporting services.
Project/Program Management Business Process Reengineering Business/Systems Analysis Software Development Data Analysis Quality Assurance and Testing Management Consulting Software Architecture
