New Charter Housing - The Paperless Office

The BancTec solution will enable New Charter to add properties quickly and easily, as all historical records relating to the properties can be scanned and archived in a short period of time.

The Client:
New Charter Housing Trust Group is one of the UK’s largest Registered Social Landlords. Formed in 1999 to own and manage properties that were previously controlled by Tameside Metropolitan Borough Council, New Charter now manages 15,600 properties. This vibrant not-for-profit organisation boasts an annual turnover of £49 million (US$77.9 million, €66.15 million), and has a workforce of 800.

The Process:
New Charter was in the process of reviewing its document management requirements when they decided to build new office premises in Ashton-under-Lyne to accommodate 370 staff from 16 locations in the East Manchester region. The management team realised that although a 50,000 square foot facility would be sufficient to house the employees, they would need to build an additional floor to accommodate the paper mountain that they would bring with them. At an estimated additional cost of £600,000 (US$950,000, €864,500) this didn’t make sense, so the deadline for implementing an advanced document management solution became inextricably linked to the building completion date of January 24 2004.

The Business Challenge:
New Charter’s primary business involves processing 6,400 applications for housing each year, dealing with enquiries from existing tenants, handling enquiries from the public, keeping abreast of new government initiatives and legislation, acquiring new properties and maintaining existing ones. For each of New Charter’s properties there is a paper-based folder containing all information relating to that property: site visit reports, property deeds, maintenance and repair job cards, and so on. For each tenant there is a folder containing items such as applications for housing, doctor’s reports and tenancy agreements. In addition, New Charter must store a wide variety of government and legal documentation.

Maintaining these tens of thousands of property and tenant files and folders, and the relationships between them, had become a labour intensive and error-prone process. The management team recognised that time spent handling paper and searching for files is time that could be better spent dealing with customers.

New Charter is also in the unique position of owning a building company that undertakes all maintenance work on the properties. In the last three years this company has carried out 190,000 repairs, generating 50,000 job tickets annually. The building company repairs properties at a lower cost, which adds to profitability and enables the organisation to reinvest the money saved into homes and services for it customers. However a greater contribution could be made if the cost of storing and administering the job tickets could be curbed.

The Solution:
Using BancTec’s property management solution, 500 New Charter staff members will gain electronic access to all property and tenant files. This will enable them to check the status of repairs, suitability of tenants, applications etc. with greater speed and efficiency. The new system will dramatically improve customer service, save costly storage space and enable staff to spend more time assessing cases rather than searching for files.

All incoming mail will be intercepted in the mailroom where it will be opened and scanned by operators. Staff will receive their mail electronically, and workflow will be implemented to handle enquiries. Hand written notes will no longer need to be keyed-in – they can simply be scanned and forwarded electronically. 

The enormous backfile of one million documents was converted by BancTec’s Busines Process Outsourcing operation in Harlow, and stored in eFIRST Archive to provide a comprehensive online repository of all historical and current data relating to every property and tenant that has dealt with New Charter. The main system is located in New Charter Housing's premises, while a backup server will reside at the building company’s depot for disaster recovery purposes.

The Benefits:
The benefits of the property management solution at New Charter are considerable:

• Physical space savings
• Ease and speed of document retrieval
• Enhanced customer service and better enquiry handling
• Improved relationships with tenants
• Elimination of manual duplication of documents for inclusion in multiple folders
• Tracking of tenant movements – their details can now be linked to multiple property folders
• Faster processing of housing applications
• More effective management of building repair job tickets