AgFirst Receives Award for Workflow Application

COLUMBIA, SC – AgFirst Farm Credit Bank was announced as the winner of an Award of Excellence in Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow at a conference of the Workflow Management Coalition held recently in Chicago. The award honored the development of the AgVUE™ platform, which AgFirst created for its customers to automate, measure, and optimize business processes. The AgVUE platform was developed using the BizAgi™ Business Process Management suite of products.

The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) is a global organization of developers, consultants, analysts, and research groups engaged in workflow and BPM. The WfMC creates and contributes to process-related standards, educates the market on BPM issues, and is the only standards organization that concentrates purely on process.

The WfMC’s 2014 Global Excellence Awards focused specifically on process innovation and operational excellence within organizations involved in banking, finance, and insurance. Bala Sivankoil, director of application development, accepted the award for AgVUE on behalf of AgFirst and its customers, and also took the stage with a case-study presentation during the conference portion of the event. He provided first-hand experience of implementing an enterprise-level BPM solution and explained how AgFirst transformed its loan submittal process in just 16 weeks.

“AgVUE increases the accuracy of our loan transactions, and improves employee productivity by reducing duplicative entry of data and manual checklists,” said Dave Corum, CEO of AgCarolina Farm Credit, a customer of AgFirst and partner in the development of AgVUE.

A key feature of the AgVUE platform is the mobile-accessible interface, which allows loan analysts to better manage the loan transaction and approval process. “A loan analyst can review and approve loan applications from anywhere – in the office or in the field,” said Corum. “This will help remove bottlenecks and delays in the loan approval chain, which ultimately means a quicker and smoother experience for our customers – the farmers and agribusinesses in rural America that depend on us.

“After the success of the AgCarolina deployment of AgVUE, we are aggressively expanding the platform across the AgFirst district to cover other business functions, including standards of conduct governance, disaster recovery documentation, and appraisal requests,” said AgFirst Vice President of Business Applications Tony Stone.

An agile method was used to develop AgVUE, which encourages collaboration between cross-functional teams and better aligns technical development with customer needs, rather than a traditional project management approach. This method focuses on a disciplined process that breaks down development into phases with frequent inspection and customer interaction, and quicker delivery dates to ultimately bring a product to market faster.

“This approach allows us to create solutions for our customers in a relatively short amount of time – in as little as 16 weeks, rather than 6 months or more,” said Sivankoil.

AgFirst customers can now handle more loans with greater accuracy, from both desktop platforms and mobile devices. AgVUE also provides management with baseline metrics to monitor, measure, and improve performance.

“We strive to constantly find better ways to help our customers serve their mission of supporting rural America. AgVUE is one of those ways and we are honored to receive an award of excellence for this innovative software solution,” said Ben Blakewood, chief information officer for AgFirst.

About AgFirst Farm Credit Bank

Headquartered in Columbia, South Carolina, AgFirst Farm Credit Bank is part of the nationwide Farm Credit System. With reported assets of more than $28 million, AgFirst provides funding and financial services to 19 Agricultural Credit Associations in 15 eastern states and Puerto Rico. These associations operate as Farm Credit and Ag Credit member-owned cooperatives, and provide real estate and production financing to 80,000 farmers, agribusinesses, and rural homeowners.

About Farm Credit

The Farm Credit System is a network of agricultural and rural lending institutions cooperatively owned by their borrowers. With combined assets of more than $260 billion, Farm Credit helps maintain and improve the quality of life in rural America and on the farm, through its constant commitment to competitive lending, expert financial services, and a feeling of partnership with its customers.

About BizAgi

Bizagi (which stands for business agility) is a privately-owned company run by software entrepreneurs who are experts in Business Process Management (BPM). Over 350 global customers have selected Bizagi to model and automate their business processes which results in improved and operational efficiencies, shorter time to market, and business agility. Our enterprise customers gain significant competitive advantage by using Bizagi’s software to streamline mission-critical processes (cross-functional, complex, and international) as well as mundane daily routines. With global headquarters in the UK, offices in Europe, USA and Latin America, Bizagi is supported by a strong implementation partner network worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.bizagi.com.