Successes - Coral Shores Realty
The Search for the Right Document Management Technology Leads Florida Real Estate and Mortgage Firms to Westbrook Technologies

Background
When Ron Cika, owner of Coral Shores Realty, the fastest growing real estate company in Florida, and Bancplus Mortgage, both of Ft. Lauderdale, embarked on a quest for document management technology, he had no idea it would take so long to find the solution best suited for his needs. “I felt that the document management technology I was coming across was archaic and not customized for my businesses. The solutions were either too expensive or too limited in functionality,” Cika explained.

Cika thought he had exhausted all options until he looked at Fortis. “I immediately knew this was the solution to tackle the complex document management needs of two growing businesses. With over 800 employees/salespeople between both companies, I needed a solution that was flexible but with powerful capabilities for our thousands of documents, and Westbrook met our criteria,” he said.

Additionally, both the real estate and mortgage industries had regulations in place that forced companies to save documents for a number of years. Cika had to save real estate documents for five years and mortgage documents for three, and this proposed a huge challenge regarding storage, retrieval and cost. “Before implementing Fortis document management software, I would have to manually load approximately 10 to 15 boxes (each holding 3,000 documents) per month and deliver to storage. This was a huge drain on resources and time as the owner of two busy companies,” Cika explained.

The Solution
With documents stored electronically, storage costs have been reduced by thousands per year and Cika estimates that he will be able to fully eliminate the off-site storage facility by the end of 2005. With an extra four to six hours of available time now, Cika can focus on business development and managerial tasks instead of acting as the company’s courier.

File sharing and document security have been drastically improved after implementing Westbrook’s software as well. Employees can access and share files remotely via the internet and documents are safely stored electronically. Users have expanded from just Cika to the accounting and compliance staff members, and will eventually encompass the entire sales force.

“With 800 salespeople in the field, Westbrook Fortis software has enabled me to evenly distribute workloads and reallocate files and tasks when someone is sick or unavailable,” Cika continued. “The benefits of having a document management system have been an asset to so many aspects of my businesses and I cannot imagine functioning without it now.”

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