Bournville Village Trust Case Study

Bournville Village was created by the late George Cadbury to provide decent quality homes in a healthy environment, which were affordable to industrial workers. Fewer than half the inhabitants have a link with the Cadbury factory. The Bournville Village Trust was set up in 1900 to manage and develop the village and it's surroundings.

The Trust administers and develops housing today covering 1,000 acres in an area 4 miles west of Birmingham. These provide a home for some 25,000 people and includes an exceptionally wide range of housing provision. With properties in Shropshire, Warwickshire and Birmingham, the Trust now manages around 8,000 properties, evenly split between tenant and owner occupied.

The challenge
There is a vast volume of information that is kept and updated by the housing association covering each of the properties and those living there. This information, which is steadily increasing, is stored in the six offices of the Trust, and the Head Office in Birmingham as well as area offices.

Comments John Stevenson, Assistant Director of Financial Services (IT), Bournville Village Trust:

"With the burgeoning amount of information that needs to be kept, storage was becoming unwieldy. In the past we have used filing cabinets in all our offices, which meant that it had taken too long to find specific information relating to invoices, tenancy agreements, deeds, even planning documents."

Bournville Village Trust has a rolling three-year IT strategy, which is a continuous programme of improving the tools that staff have so that they are able to do their jobs more effectively. Before the issue of document management was considered, the processes used were basic, relying on manual filing in large numbers of cabinets at each of the main Trust sites. It was not only hard to keep up with the filing requirements, but the Trust wanted to improve it's invoicing process so as not to cause problems for the smaller contractors and traders, for whom rapid cashflow is vital.

The amount of paper was becoming unmanageable and the office, based in one of the original residential houses built in the 1890s, put a limit to the space available to store the information.

The team at Bournville Village Trust started to look for a different way of handling the correspondence and other documents within the Trust's day-to-day business. It was soon decided that an electronic system was needed that would be able to help manage the information more efficiently, saving time and resources. It also had to be implemented without disruption of the existing applications already in use at the Trust, for instance, accounting and finance systems and the housing package, called QL Hous ing and QL Finance. Several software vendors were evaluated and the electronic document management specialist, Invu, was selected.

The benefits
John Stevenson continues,

"We have a strong relationship with the IT consultancy, Aareon, through whom we bought QL Housing and QL Finance, and who worked with us to select Invu's document management system and oversaw the installation of this software with minimum disruption to other staff. We chose Invu not only because the price for the solution was very competitive, Aareon proved that it was going to be easily integrated into QL Housing and QL Finance used in the Head Office and our satellite offices."

Invu has developed a tool, called CodeFree Integration, which enables it's document management solution to be integrated into existing applications at the customer's site. To date Invu has successfully integrated it's document management product with over 15 other commercial pieces of software. With CodeFree Integration users of Invu's product do not need to access or change the underlying code but merely to train on the application in question. The rapid integration caused by CodeFree enables Invu to qu ickly and easily generate bespoke solutions where needed to satisfy customer demand, which was a huge selling point for Bournville Village Trust.

John Stevenson adds,

"The pilot project has been very successful and the plan now is to roll Invu out across the rest of the organisation, to include residential filing as well as non-residential. It was important that any of our staff that used Invu were happy with the results and were trained well to use the system. This has happened and we have even had requests come in from other housing associations which use QL Housing and QL Finance to come and inspect Invu's solution."

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