A 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 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 northwest community-based landlord, which owns and manages 9,000 rental homes across the region, 7,500 of which it routinely services, reported reducing the 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, “there were so many issues we had to deal with in terms of certificates getting lost, damaged, or misplaced. If there were any issues with the reports, we would need to send another engineer back to the property to go through the whole process again. It caused significant problems for many years. Since switching to using a digital system to file and store documents, the problems we were facing no longer exist.”
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.
During the pandemic, 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 sector's digital procurement processes.
Ruban Rajasooriyar Managing director, DocTech added, “the firm’s 22 years of experience of working with public organisations has enabled the business to evolve to meet the ever-changing needs of the sector.
"Our clients focus is on developing an efficient hybrid workforce that 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.
“Our longstanding and excellent working relationship with MSV and its continued expansion into digital document management is a testament to our team’s ‘solution-first’ approach.”
