Established in 1988, Land Home Financial Services is a leading direct lender headquartered in California that offers mortgage loans to residential clients across 50 states in the US. Currently servicing over $5 billion in residential mortgages, Land Home helps its clients with home purchases, refinancing, reverse mortgage, and renovation lending. It also provides professional consultation and loan analysis services to its partners — mortgage brokers, builders, manufactured and modular home retailers, and real estate agents.
With a mission to offer personalized services and specialized expertise to its customers, Land Home now employs approximately 500 licensed loan officers in 80 retail branches across the country. It also has about a hundred Administrative offices with the sole responsibility of facilitating seamless operations in the retail branches.
Identifying the challenge
To enable personalized one-to-one customer service, Land Home issues a personal computer or a laptop, an office telephone, and related accessories to each of its loan officers. However, the rapidly evolving nature of Land Home’s service network calls for frequent opening and closing of its branches and transfers of IT equipment from one branch to another.
This puts the IT and Facilities departments of Land Home at the center of asset management processes. While the Facilities department is responsible for procuring IT equipment from vendors, the Information Technology department is in charge of tagging and shipping it out to different branches based on their respective needs.
With an expansive network spanning 180 locations, efficient management of technology assets was a daunting task for these departments. According to Olivia R, IT Administrative Assistant at the Concord headquarter, Land Home could only track asset requests made by employees with its previous system.
However, Land Home still had many unmet asset management needs including robust location management that could map items onto different retail branches. It also had no option to retire Assets within the previous system.
After thorough research, the IT Support team at Land Home Financial Services decided to start using EZOfficeInventory to track their Assets.
“We use Samanage (aka) SolarWinds for the initial request of equipment but it doesn’t work well for our tracking management needs which is why we started using EZOfficeInventory”, says Olivia.
Land Home expands outreach with EZOfficeInventory
Land Home’s switch to EZOfficeInventory has been pivotal to their growth and management success. They have deftly avoided challenges stemming from a widespread asset base and poor asset disposal practices. Here’s how EZOfficeInventory helped them achieve their desired management outcomes.
Greater visibility into nationwide offices
Despite nationwide outreach, Land Home Financial Services prides itself on having a meaningful connection with local customers. EZOfficeInventory has helped Land Home fulfill its mission of one-to-one assistance by offering greater visibility into each of its offices and their expenses.
Whenever Land Home opens or closes a Branch Office, the Facilities and/or the IT Department work hand-in-in to pull up the asset database within EZOfficeInventory and checkout or transfer the relevant Assets to the branch location based on their needs. Each branch is considered a cost center that the Facilities/IT department charges for according to the operational costs it incurs. Hence, whenever a branch is about to close, the department scans the Map In Locations to identify the Assets present at the closing branch, charges the closing branch for their depreciated value, and checks the Assets back in.
“EZOfficeInventory makes it extremely easy to track equipment and it is so much better than the previous system we were using”, says Olivia. “Everything links back to the member; allowing you to see what/when Assets were checked out, when the member received them, and where the equipment may have been left behind.”
End-to-end asset lifecycle management
Prior to EZOfficeInventory, Land Home had no way to dispose of obsolete IT equipment, and a lot of their cash flow was tied up in dead stock. The absence of an asset database also made procurement a painstaking task. Olivia noted that they now diligently use the Purchase Order functionality which is a great way to track their purchases.
Now, Land Home is able to perform end-to-end asset lifecycle management. The asset database in EZOfficeInventory gets automatically updated as soon as IT receives the inventory on their end.
Depreciation tracking is also easier. The IT Department retires an Asset from the system as soon as it reaches the end of its useful life, leaving no dead stock behind.
“We were able to reduce the costs tremendously from when I first started. And it’s because of the way we can track and remove items… We saved almost $1,000 on what we were paying before which was excellent…”, says Olivia.
Streamlined auditing processes
For every employee that leaves or every branch that closes down, Land Home conducts an equipment audit. Their IT Support particularly uses the Custody Verification feature to determine whether items are still in the custody of a leaving employee.
The team also runs Item Reports frequently to figure out which Assets have been returned, audited, or have pending verification requests associated with them. They also run the Asset Deletion reports discovering which Assets have been retired from the stock. EZOfficeInventory reports act as formal documentation that they can forward to the senior management for audit purposes.
Securing long-term customer relationships with EZOfficeInventory
Land Home believes in the importance of long-term customer relationships, especially when it comes to home and financial security. According to Olivia, the responsiveness of EZOfficeInventory’s Support team has greatly facilitated the administrative and retail operations in their offices.
Thanks to EZOfficeInventory, their IT Support Department is equipped 24/7 to service their clients. Olivia particularly lauded EZOfficeInventory’s uninterrupted support during the pandemic.
“Even though the pandemic created such a halt in most business performances due to everyone working from home, the customer service response time by EZOfficeInventory was not affected by any means!”
She added that the representatives still responded to their inquiries either immediately or within 24 hours. The professionalism, training, and flexibility of the EZOfficeInventory team enabled her to use all of the functions for tracking Assets/Purchase Orders and even customize desired fields.
With EZOfficeInventory, Land Home Financial Services is able to seamlessly run its operations across the country and deliver its promise of consistent and superior services.
“I’ve worked on many different asset management systems and by far, this is the most user-friendly system I’ve encountered and most importantly, the price is great,” Olivia concluded.
