One of the UK’s largest Social Housing landlords also acts as one of the National Housing Federations Home Buy agent dealing with 24,000 plus applications for the sale of Key Worker and Shared Ownership homes.

A solution was needed to:- 

• Address receipt and filing of the original paper application forms along with backup documentation.

• To maintain a Data Base with the full details of each applicant to enable the matching of these to suitable properties anywhere in the region.

• Provide access to the master Data Base to almost a 150 regional Local Councils and Housing Associations to search for suitable applicants in their area.

• Distribute copies of Application Forms and back up documents.

• Remove the costly labour intensive handling of Paper.

• Remove the expensive postage costs distributing copies of Application Forms to the locally based Housing Associations.

• To control the ongoing correspondence and emails.

• Maintain a minimal internal head count due to the pressure on available office space.

• Have comprehensive reporting tools to allow them to produce a wide range of statistics as demanded by the Local Authorities.

A solution has been found by the use of our DMS “Inview” Document Management Software, plus the New Documents and Messages Modules. A Bespoke version of our Customer Relation Manager Data Base has been produced including the tools to meet their reporting requirements.

Originally the Document processing was being carried out at Digital Papers Scanning Bureau using the Post Room service via a PO Box address. Data Capture was provided to capture the thirty two main values from each Application Forms e.g Name, Address, Type of Property etc.

The complete service is being Hosted on our secure WEB Server.

Space for equipment and related staff were removed by using the PO Box service to direct all application forms to Digital Papers Bureau’s where they were scanned and data captured before being uploaded to New Documents Tray on the DMS secure WEB server. The Data Input is loaded into the master CRM data base. Each day’s new forms are completed and processed the same day.

After each form has gone through an assessment process, the file is moved into the Main Online Data Base in the DMS, from where, by secure login via the Internet, the regional Housing Associations can search the CRM Data Base for suitable applicants and view the related documents and files On Line. This in turn has removed the need to handle Paper Files, eliminated high postal charges and reduced delays from at best a day to a few seconds.

Since its inception almost 10 years ago 1000’s of applications have been processed. The software has been continually updated to meet both the Clients needs and the changes made by the Government’s eligibility criteria.

One of the main changes has been the introduction of a new App to allow new applications to be completed online. These are now directly imported into the DMS removing the need for the original scanning and Data capture.