Manchester based housing association reaps the rewards of new digital system

A leading housing group has revealed transferring one area of its operation to a digital system has saved £22.500 per year. Mosscare St Vincent’s Housing Group (MSV) also said migrating its gas safety reporting processes to an online document management system has saved 234 days of work annually since the Covid-19 pandemic began in 2020.

The north west community-based landlord, which owns and manages 9,000 rental homes across the region 7,500 of which it routinely services reported reducing time by an average of 15 minutes per property by cutting needless paperwork.

John Paul Petryczuk, ICT and business systems architect at MSV, which employs 350 staff, said: “It has been a revelation since we moved away from using paper for filing our gas safety certificates.

“When you consider the number of properties we service, that is a lot of time and money we have recouped in a relatively short period. There were so many issues we had to deal with in terms of certificates getting lost, damaged or misplaced.”

“Since switching to using a digital system to file and store documents, the problems we were facing no longer exist. The migration really has been nothing short of a revelation. The sheer number of benefits we have seen has almost been unquantifiable. Everything is now so much easier to store, access and check. We certainly won’t be going back to paper.”

MSV previously partnered with digital document management software provider DocTech for other areas of its operations, including accounting, and general administration. The Manchester-based business’ automated solution was introduced in 2015 to improve efficiency.

But with the emergence of the covid pandemic at the start of 2020, everything changed. Social distancing, remote working and other restrictions on human contact rendered traditional paper systems virtually obsolete.

To maintain its workflow throughout 2020 and the following year, MSV said it had to expand its digital systems to remove the need to share physical documents, such as tenancy agreements, reports and contracts.

Digital signatures were also introduced by integrating DocTech’s solution with MSV’s housing management system, MRI Housing Enterprise.

DocTech has recently been named as an official supplier in a new £2.8 billion government framework to boost the public sectors digital procurement processes.

Managing director Ruban Rajasooriyar added “the firm’s 22 years’ experience of working with public organisations has enabled the business to evolve to meet the ever-changing needs of the sector.

“Many of our biggest clients are in the public sector, which has helped us to develop a deep understanding of the unique challenges they face. Our clients focus is on developing an efficient hybrid workforce which is also safe and transparent with regards to the appropriate management of sensitive data. We are constantly evolving our solutions to tackle the challenges faced by our clients.

By Mark Adair – Correspondent, Bdaily