Case Study – Swansea Housing Association
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”.
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.”
The Benefits of Using Alfresco
- Fast set-up and modification of business processes and workflows
- Integrated transformation of word document to .pdf eliminating manual creation by Swansea staff
- Greater flexibility and speed in setting up additional projects utilizing space templates
- Provides a unified open and scalable repository upon which to build custom solutions
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.