Introduction

The Automation Engine (formerly called ‘Rules Applied’) is a customizable automation system in LMS that uses criteria to automatically implement actions within your account. This article is a basic overview on what the Automation Engine is and how you can use it to automate your loan servicing.

Why the Automation Engine is Useful

Let's say that your company has a policy of forgiving debt when the remaining payoff is less than $10. You could search through all your loans, check the remaining payoff, and issue a credit to those that qualify, but that process will require a lot of time and resources from your loan servicers. Instead, the Automation Engine lets you specify a criterion, such as Payoff is less than $10, and implement an action — Issue a credit for the remaining balance. The system will check which loans match your criteria and automatically issue the credit. And in the future, the system will continue to check if any new loans qualify.

The only thing a lender has to do is create a rule, and then the system will take over. Servicers won't need to go back into every loan and make changes.

Criteria and Actions

It's important to know the difference between criteria and actions when creating a rule. The criteria are what needs to happen for an action to take place. The action is what takes place when the criteria are met. For example, lets say that you set up a rule that states that if any loan is greater than 120 days past due, then the status of the loan would be changed automatically to "charged-off". Your criteria is that Days past due are greater than 120, and your action is to Change the Loan Status to "Charged-off".

Criteria and Clojure

A person can read your criteria and understand what you mean. Computers, however, need things to be written out very clearly in code. LMS uses a coding language called Clojure for the Automation Engine. Clojure expresses your criteria with equations and variables, creating something like a true-or-false statement describing the loan. When the statement is true, LMS will implement the action you specified on the loan.

(> status-days-past-due 120)

Actions

When the system evaluates a rule on a loan and finds that it's true, it will apply the actions you've set up. A single rule can trigger any number of actions.

Actions can alter a loan's settings, prompt a transaction, or update its and portfolios.

Terminology

These are the terms used in the Automation Engine:

The Feature is Not

Let's take a second to clarify the limitations of the Automation Engine.

• The Automation Engine doesn't give you the same case-by-case decision making as you'd have if you did things manually. Automation, by definition, means giving control over to the system. Some users may feel wary using the Automation Engine because they may feel as though they aren't as involved in the loans that they manage. If you want a loan agent to have close oversight over every step of your servicing process, you might want to limit your use of the Automation Engine and instead check out tools like Agent Walkthroughs.
• The Automation Engine can't detect problems in your Clojure rules. The Automation Engine will do exactly what you tell them to—even if that's not what you want. For example, consider our rule from earlier, (> status-days-past-due 120). If you included a minor typo and flipped the greater than symbol around, this rule would do the exact opposite of what you want. That may ruin your day. Thus, it's important to use caution when writing criteria.

What's Next?

This is a basic overview on the Automation Engine. For more complex steps on creating rules in LMS, take a look at our Setting Up the Automation Engine article. For more info on Clojure, see Intro to Clojure Rules.