Vela is a driving force behind housing and community regeneration projects in Stockton and Hartlepool. As the largest social landlord in the Tees Valley and among the top 50 in the country, Vela has an annual spending power of £65m in 2011/12.

Housing Hartlepool and Tristar Housing will retain their distinct identities within the Vela Group and continue to operate as separate charities. The new group aims to deliver substantial benefits, including greater buying power leading to better value for money for customers. Providing a fully integrated intranet across both organisations will lead to increased workforce integration and collaboration.

The Challenge

Vela is seeking to achieve rapid integration and productive collaboration between Housing Hartlepool and Tristar Housing’s staff. One of the key technology enablers to achieving this is an intranet that creates a common platform to improve communication and collaboration between the employees of both organisations.

Selection Process

Housing Hartlepool was using SORCE for their intranet and document management requirements at the time of the amalgamation with Tristar Housing. The decision was taken to standardise on SORCE to provide a common platform for both organisations.

The Solution

The SORCE intranet provides a common platform for the rapid integration and establishment of a consistent set of intranet-based business applications that can be applied to both organisations in the new Vela Group.

The reasons Vela chose SORCE as their preferred intranet platform include:-

• Easy to use
• Quick deployment
• Customisable
• Used by other housing associations
• Large portfolio of common business applications
• Ability to create a common knowledge repository

The intranet’s initial business goal is to share the expertise and best practice from both companies in a single secure knowledge base that is accessible to all employees.

The Result

The SORCE intranet has enabled:-

• A productive, collaborative workforce
• Rapid cross-organisational communications and information sharing
• Business processes and procedures standardisation
• Common access to shared content across Brands

Vela is already planning to develop the SORCE intranet further to unlock more efficiencies and increase productivity.

Oliver Rogers, ICT Project Co-ordinator for Vela, said,
“To achieve our goals we need to ensure that all our dedicated staff has access to the right information at the right time to service our customers effectively. The SORCE intranet gives us a solution that makes it easier to manage communication, teamwork and business processes across both Housing Hartlepool and Tristar Housing.”