Helena Housing

Timezone Digital Storage and Avanquest partner to furnish Helena Housing with Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition technology to manage their paper, files and records

Timezone Digital Storage, a Document Scanning Bureau, located in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, turned a potential customer loss into a positive gain with some astute thinking and help from Avanquest, leaders in Business Communications Management.

Timezone’s customer, Helena Housing is a housing association based over several locations in St Helens, Merseyside. Timezone supplied a scanning service to Helena Housing, scanning their regular quantity of redundant tenancy files. This provided Timezone with regular business and a steady revenue stream. Documents were scanned and the information stored for the client on CD for future reference.

The benefits of a good relationship with their client meant that Alan Edge at Timezone was aware of the Association’s plans to modernise and improve their manual documentation processes and replace it with a document management system. Paper documents would cease to exist, so there would be no ongoing need to scan obsolete documents at the end of their lifecycle.

Timezone recognised this as a positive opportunity. Their Bureau could actually help Helena Housing achieve their objectives, which included the scanning of 2.25 million unstructured archived tenancy documents, allowing them to maintain their association with Helena Housing as a preferred supplier.

Hard copy Tenancy files were stored in cabinets, filed under address contacts. As well as concerns that fire could destroy all the data, delays in having to pull individual files, slowed down the whole Tenants query process. Documents could easily be misfiled or whole files put back in the wrong place. Callers were left on-hold while the physical trip was made to get the relevant file or call-backs had to be arranged for a later time or date. The system was inefficient and insecure. There was also a huge volume of bulky paper files in different locations, taking up a large amount of space and making timely access difficult. Electronic document processing would speed up the process and once scanned, allow secure access to all current and archived documents from any location.

Bespoke features developed for Helena Housing are Index Station and Tenant Move. Index Station allows users to quickly and accurately index documents from their workstation, assigning unique address recognition ID. Tenant Move simplifies the ‘moving between houses’ process, automatically moving and assigning appropriate tenant documents to the new address. This drastically reduced the time and effort required for a necessary task that is not always the most popular with staff!

The Open Text Document Server, Alchemy Edition system is integrated with Helena Housing’s management system; IBS open housing, a solution supplied by IBS Open systems. Users can now access documents directly from the IBS Open Housing interface at the click of a button. Training is therefore minimal and access to documents has been reduced to seconds.

Open Text Document Server software is a flexible document management solution that provides scaleable document and data management at an affordable cost with ease of use. The solution will work within an organisation’s existing network of Multifunctional devices – copiers, printers and scanners.

“Document Server was clearly the best choice for Helena Housing. Avanquest UK focused on our specific needs as a Housing Association and tailored both the interface and development of the system to meet our exact requirements. They have knowledge and experience in handling large volumes of documents and demonstrated a strong ability to work with us to ensure that we meet all of our goals.”

Ian Robertson, Project Manager at Helena Housing.

Expertise provided by Avanquest has been able to add value to Timezone as a supplier, resulting in an Document Server implementation specifically tailored to the business and operational needs of Helena Housing. The relationship between Timezone and Avanquest has continued to grow. Timezone’s business has increased and in 2005 they were credited with an accolade for ‘Best New Business Introduction (Housing Associations)’.

More information

For information on any of our solutions or products, please call us on 01962 835053 or email sales@processflows.co.uk.