Case Study – Swansea Housing Association

Swansea 
Housing Assocation

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Swansea Housing Association is a non-profit organization set up in 1978 which provides homes in the Swansea and Neath Port Talbot areas for a wide variety of people of different age groups, many with different needs and accommodation preferences. It specializes in creative urban regeneration and readily embraces change in social housing procurement and partnering. The Association manages a property portfolio with a book value of £130 million and an open market value of £450 million.

Business Challenges

Swansea Housing Association was looking for a solution that would give them a flexible yet secure platform to organize their project content. They needed to be able to set up new project templates quickly and easily without incurring costly consulting man hours and unnecessary project delays.

The system needed to be able to give users the ability to create and participate in an auditable document lifecycle where access can be given to those that need it in a secure fashion even from a remote location. Previously, workflow and business process modifications required changes to the underlying programming code, which were costly and time consuming.

They were looking for a system that would be able to adapt to the Association’s developing ECM requirements by creating an open and scalable repository to build custom solutions in support of their expanding property portfolio. An open architecture would give them the flexibility to add-on systems in the future in a modular way at a lower cost.

“We could clearly see the benefits of Alfresco over our existing system. We now have the ability to manage our process and workflows in ways we could only do after placing a call to our developers”.

Geoff Pettifor – Director of Development, Swansea Housing Association

Creating Secure Document Management

It was very important for the new document management system to deliver a solution that the Association’s own users could share and manage themselves. Alfresco with its intuitive, easy to set up rules, business processes and workflows can be modified as and when required by its end users. Previously to clone the application required several days of work while now a new project can be set up using same rules and space structure in a matter of minutes.

Swansea Housing Association also required integrated transformation of Microsoft® Word™ documents to PDF to eliminate manual creation by the Association staff which Alfresco could deliver in one proven, flexible solution. The new system also needed to be able to migrate data to Alfresco.

With the help of Alfresco business partners Aarden Ringcroft and Rivet Logic Corp. This was easily achieved by extracting data to an XML format which conformed to Alfresco .acp file import type and moving the data over using the standard Alfresco administrator console import. Document versions, user and group information was brought over simultaneously leveraging the power and ease of use of the Alfresco Web Services.

By simplifying and modularizing content management, the Alfresco system is much faster than many commercial content management systems. In addition it provides a unified open and scalable repository upon which to build custom solutions in support of Swansea Housing Associations ever-evolving ECM requirements.

“This represents a major opportunity to change and enhance the way we work.”

Geoff Pettifor – Director of Development, Swansea Housing Association

The Benefits of Using Alfresco

Why Swansea Housing Association Chose Alfresco

Swansea Housing Association chose Alfresco for the experience of their team – 15 years of experience in document management – together with the support of Alfresco business partners Aarden Ringcroft and Rivet Logic Corp. The Association also realized that through the use of open technology the Alfresco solution is significantly lower in cost than other ECM solutions on the market. This open source approach delivers a solution that is easy to use, scalable and flexible, giving them the ability to easily integrate other products or partners as they need to build on their ECM project for the future.

External Links

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Fast Facts

  • Swansea Housing Association is a non-profit making organization which provides homes in the Swansea and Neath Port Talbot areas.
  • It specializes in creative urban regeneration and readily embraces change in social housing procurement and partnering.
  • It has sales of £30m and a property portfolio of £130 million.
  • It has 90 employees based from its offices in Swansea and Neath

Industry

  • Non-Profit – Social Housing

Business Challenges

  • Reduce Cost by Allowing Project Templates to be Created and Re-Used without Costly Consulting
  • Auditable Document Lifecycle
  • To share and collaborate on vital project documents.
  • To Extend Document Sharing, Collaboration and Auditing to project stake holders – including planners, builders and architects
  • Reduce Cost through the use of Open Source Technology to build customer solutions

Technical Challenges

  • Ease of Use
  • Document Lifecycle Management
  • Migrating from previous system to Alfresco

Benefits

  • Fast set-up and modification of business processes and workflows by the users.
  • Integrated transformation of Micosoft Word documents to PDF
  • Greater flexibility and speed in setting up additional projects.
  • Provides a unified open and scalable repository upon which to build custom solutions.

Why Alfresco

  • Experience of the team
  • Lower cost than traditional ECM vendors
  • Superior functionality and usability
  • Flexible pricing model
  • Open Source Model

Technical Profile

Planned rollout using:

  • Hardware – Hosted Intel
  • Operating System – Windows XP
  • RAM – 2GB
  • Database – MySQL
  • Application Server – Tomcat