Manitoba’s 1.3 million residents look to Teranet to help them accurately and efficiently register their property transactions. Teranet operates provincial land and personal property registry services on behalf of the Government of Manitoba, which includes end-to-end document processing for all real estate transactions in the province. They are proud innovators — their peers in the industry agree, as they recently received the SS&C Blue Prism Customer Excellence Award for Innovation Brilliance. Teranet successfully integrated intelligent automation (IA) with ParaScript, an optical character recognition (OCR) tool, to automate complex form verifications which include handwritten, unstructured data.

Challenge

When a real estate transaction — whether residential, commercial or land-only — is initiated in Manitoba, documentation must be gathered, verified and submitted to the official governmental registry. This documentation includes signature pages with relevant buyer, seller and legal representative information — and it’s usually handwritten. Teranet utilizes complex Smart PDF forms that contain an average of 20 single pages, seven handwritten pages and more than 20 form fields on each page. The complexity of these documents required step-by-step verification by two Teranet employees. The turn-around time (TAT) for each transaction was between three to four days. Each application had to be entirely correct, or it could be rejected by the registry system. Additionally, when volumes grew too large for regular staff to handle, Teranet was required to hire additional temporary workers. That staff had to be recruited, hired and trained. Errors inevitably crept in, which resulted in 30% of the transactions requiring rework.

Solution

Teranet developed a complex integrated solution leveraging IA and OCR. They demonstrated their pioneering and innovative nature by being the first in their industry to successfully extract unstructured, handwritten data in the Smart PDF via an OCR engine and passing that data to SS&C Blue Prism digital workers to complete the end-to-end verification.

Forty percent of applications are now processed with no human intervention. The rest are viewed first by an employee and then passed on to the digital worker. This has cut staffing needs for the process in half. Additionally, 100 workdays (8,000 hours) have been given back to the business, allowing employees more time to work on other projects and eliminating the backlog of transactions. Teranet’s ability to handle variations in volume, which can be a 100% increase month-to-month, has increased exponentially. They’re no longer in a mad rush to hire and train temporary staff and have saved more than CAD $150,000 as a result.

Customers have benefited from this innovative solution, too. The TAT to complete a real estate transaction was reduced by 75% — from three or four days to just one day. Now that customers’ documentation is processed swiftly and without errors, they’re positioned to buy or sell their property much more quickly. The solution has created value for all involved parties including the buyer, seller, lawyers, real estate brokers and lenders by increasing accuracy and capacity and reducing the time to process each transaction.