“We’ve been on Symitar for 17 years,” ORNL president/CEO Colin Anderson said. “It is a very flexible product, very customizable. We found we’ve customized it to the point where we’ve created some issues for ourselves. We love Symitar, we just need to untangle some of the things we’ve done and better use some of their best practices.”

Dawn Brummett, SVP, COO and chief credit officer for ORNL, said, “We felt like Symitar was still the best system,” adding ORNL's core system just wasn't functioning the way a brand new system would.

The credit union brought in Symitar to perform an evaluation.

“They approached it almost like a full conversion,” Anderson said. “They had a conversion team dedicated to us with the same kind of timeline that you would have on a real conversion.”

The evaluation included a review of the current business lines ORNL offered and what the credit union wanted to achieve in the future.

“That allowed Symitar to pitch back to us where they really thought they could take it with their current system,” Brummet recalled.

The credit union is about three months into the reconversion process. Symitar recently brought in a conversion team and participated in a kick-off meeting with ORNL's stakeholders.

Currently, the credit union is performing a comprehensive review of all its procedural documents, considering changes to account opening procedures and incorporating Symitar's best practices into many of its operations.

ORNL's review includes:

• An assessment of all notices, forms, letter and reports, according to Anderson. “Those are all going to be rewritten so they are in the same tone, same language,” he said. “A lot of those were written at different times by different people and they say different things.”

• An evaluation of nightly processing jobs.

• Making changes to products, including consolidating products, simplifying products and renaming products.

• Altering the entire coding structure, including altering interfaces to the general ledger to add consistency and aid reporting across all business lines.

One important factor that worked in ORNL's favor was staff awareness.

“Everybody is familiar with Symitar and all our systems, services and processes are built around it,” Anderson said.

Spring cleaning took on a new meaning at ORNL because of the ongoing reconversion process.

“When you are on a system for 17 years, there is a point where you are not going back and reviewing every data field,” Brummet explained.

Now, the credit union is going through every business line to cleanse data in the systems used to serve members, as well as to support frontline and back-end operations.

“It is going to give us an opportunity as we validate those fields to set some new business requirements and a new discipline around the changed process,” Brummet said. “So not only do we get the improvement, the efficiency and the validation now, we implement a process to keep it clean going forward.”

Anderson added, “It's not just updating Symitar, it's adding on, or bolting on, all of their latest product applications to get us to a current state.”

Among the new additions were the Synapsys Member Relationship Management, SilverLake System for business loans, Synergy Document Management, Enhanced Member Application new account module and Enhanced Loan Application, an automated tool for managing and completing loan applications.

“We’re in full project mode,” Brummet said.

The Tennessee credit union holds regular meetings with the Symitar conversion team, weekly meetings with its executive team and close to daily meetings with various business partners.

Anderson explained each department manager has been challenged with ensuring the credit union comes out of the process with its desired enhancements and improvements, so it doesn't end up with the same thing.

“This project requires all levels of the organization, so one of the exercises we go through is not only getting feedback from the business line manager, but bringing in subject line experts identified throughout the credit union,” Brummet emphasized. “Employees at all levels are engaged as part of this process.”

They even held a contest among employees to come up with a name for this process. The winning moniker: Symplify.

It has two mock conversions scheduled in September and November, and the actual reconversion is set for Dec. 12.

“Things will be converting all along,” Anderson said. “Because we are already a Symitar client, we can do things in a staged fashion. It doesn't feel like a conversion date so much as a series of improvements.”

Central Minnesota went through a similar process.

“When we started thinking about converting, we were on the Symitar Episys system for 19 going on 20 years,” Jason MacDonald, SVP of IT at Central Minnesota, said.

“What brought us to Symitar in 1996 was that it was a customizable system,” MacDonald explained.

Customization was very important to Central Minnesota because it required support for its strong agricultural and commercial lending base.

“We customized the system to support our business model,” he said.

MacDonald pointed out that as a result, the credit union added many customized and user-defined tracking fields, which led to an inefficient operating environment. “The customization put in 10 or 20 years ago did not necessarily work today.”

Central Minnesota enlisted the Seattle-based Next Step Consulting to help review the core provider marketplace. The firm's evaluation process included full-scale RFPs, selections, evaluations and reference checks.

Ultimately, it came down to two core systems.

“We felt the Episys platform was still the right platform for us,” MacDonald said. “So there was a little bit of validation as we went through the process.”

The credit union decided to reconvert to the Episys platform because of its familiarity, flexibility and available resources. It also allowed Central Minnesota to unravel the spaghetti knots of customization in place and take advantage of all the updates and enhancements of the core system, MacDonald noted.

“We had so many different pieces of customization in place and manual processes and inefficiency, we needed a system we could take advantage of and make more efficient,” he said.

If you have customization within your system, it's hard to get a good picture of the data and be able to disseminate it.”

The process of inspecting the platform results in cleaner data, he explained.

Central Minnesota began the reconversion process at the beginning of 2016 and is now about 25% through. The credit union finished the planning and design phase and is now getting into the execution and implementation phase with a scheduled live date of Oct. 3.

MacDonald said Central Minnesota focuses on three pillars: Strength, service and growth.

“In order for us to support the organization through those three pillars, we felt like we needed a solid system to support us,” he said.

He explained the project grew out of the strategic objective of organizational effectiveness. The credit union gave it a name, Phoenix, and a tagline, “a single truth with seamless integration.”

It is now able to utilize other Symitar components, such as Episys Collateral & Document Tracking, to maintain and manage loan collateral and document exceptions. Central Minnesota is looking to add Synergy Document Management as well.

Another key factor in the credit union's decision was the ability to incorporate best-of-breed or best-of-suite apps and modules.

“With the Episys platform and the fact we do quite a bit of [agricultural] and commercial lending, it was important to have a system we could integrate,” MacDonald said. “That's where the seamless integration piece comes in.”

Among the other programs Central Minnesota employs are D+H's CreditQuest Credit Manager commercial and AG loan origination, and MeridianLink's XpressAccounts and LoansPQ, which provides online account origination as well as loan origination.

The credit union already has mobile banking in place through Access Softek and is hoping to enhance its online presence by driving loan origination applications online.

“When it is all said and done, the idea here is to make our operations as efficient as possible,” MacDonald said.

He compared it to remodeling a house.

“We’re tearing down all the walls and the sheetrock on the inside of the house, but we’re leaving the frame and the outside walls up,” he said. “We’re building new rooms and making it look nice and clean, and fresh and functional.”