Tamarack Trail Mix: Customer Sync in Solifi’s Originations and Portfolio Management Systems

(The following instructions assume the reader has Solifi’s Originations system (formally Rapport) as their front end, with Solifi’s Portfolio Management system (formally InfoLease) as their back end, and that the systems are tied together.)

Customer record changes in Solifi’s Originations and Portfolio Management systems are designed to automatically synchronize on a real-time basis. However, there are times when the customer records in Originations do not synchronize regularly as they are saved.

Examples:

1. The Portfolio Management Nightly Job Stream (NJS) process is not complete or Originations’ connection to the back end is otherwise down.
2. A customer record has “bad” data saved to it (in either system) that is being interpreted incorrectly in the XML transfer.

When one of the two scenarios occur, users will see a yellow attention message icon near the customer name in Originations search results. Clicking on the attention icon will provide additional detail about the error.

Attention messages are stored in the “ATTENTION_MESSAGES” table within the Originations system database. When the issue behind the error is corrected, the system will attempt to clear the message.

Possible Reasons for the Data Issues:

1. Bad characters in text can sometimes be inserted during copy-and-paste functions into word processing fields. These can include non-printing line feeds or carriage returns.
2. The pipe (|) symbol is often used as a field-delimiter in HTML. If it is used in fields, the synchronization process can interpret that field as two fields rather than data for a single field (e.g., Insurance Agent Name = “Smith|Carlson Insurance Group”).

When Originations is unable to synchronize customer data to the Portfolio Management system after several attempts, it will write the customer record to a file in its database, called “CUST_SYNC”. A Windows service is then triggered to watch for the back-end connection to resume and for the customer synchronization process to be restarted.

To allow the front- and back-end systems to continue to synchronize customers, Originations will leave the bad record in the CUST_SYNC table and move on to synchronize remaining customer records. The synchronization process can also halt if the connection has been down long enough.

(NOTE: Clients operating in Solifi’s “Cloud” environment will need to work with Solifi’s support team to rectify customer synchronization issues. Clients that are “onprem” and have access to their own servers can research these issues directly.)

Once admins have determined the customer record(s) with bad data, there are tools to investigate further:

1. An admin can look at the last fields that have been edited (data copied to word processing fields, updates including special characters) within the Change History logs for that customer.
2. On the Application Server (in the AppServer folder), the “GetLongText” utility provided by Solifi can help look at the XML data for the entity record/s in question.

(NOTE: If you are unfamiliar with the GetLongText utility, please contact us.)

In GetLongText, look for data in the “ENT_ROOT_XML” field of the ENTITY table for that customer record. The bad data will typically be apparent but may require some searching. Once you have isolated the data to be corrected in the record, return to the CCAN in Originations to fix the data. (Remember: the CCAN and the ENTITY_KEY may be different numbers.)

Once the data has been corrected, the erroneous record needs to be deleted from the CUST_SYNC table and the customer should be synchronized again (saved again in Originations to trigger the synchronization process).

If users see the customer in the Portfolio Management System with any changed data from Originations, you will know the record has been picked up. Remember to check the customer synchronization process to verify it is still running after there has been a delay in front-to-back-end connections. It may need to be restarted.

Admins should regularly investigate the customer records that have been written to the CUST_SYNC table to verify there is no bad data stored in any of the customer fields.

Other things to remember:

1. Remember to set up the initial Customer Sync Process. Solifi’s “Rapport Technical Reference – SQL Server” documentation provides further details on the setup of the Initial Customer Synchronization. See “Synchronizing Customers” in that documentation.
2. The “Rapport Technical Reference – SQL Server” document provides various support concepts and accompanies each version/release of the software.

Occasionally checking tables such as “ATTENTION_MESSAGES” and “CUST_SYNC” will help admins keep the Originations database clean. Reports can be generated to show the contents of these tables on a regular basis.